Fear not! Chicago friends: we too can now have — fashion!

Some of us here in Chicago complain about the shocking levels of segregation and inequality, the entrenched political machine of Mayor Daley, the gentrification pushing working folks to the wall. But you know what? I think things are looking up.

"So many people outside Chicago still think we're all eating deep-dish pizza and wearing sweat pants," [boutique owner Lance] Lawson said. All that, he insisted, is changing. There is an emerging fashion scene in Chicago, marked by an explosion of small, progressive boutiques catering to a style-starved population, and, perhaps as telling, an infiltration of luxury stores — Louis Vuitton, Prada, Giorgio Armani — near Lake Michigan on the city's Gold Coast.

(What does the word "progressive" mean in this context?)

Ruth La Ferla, "Chicago Moves Out to America's Edge", The New York Times, 2004 June 22