PSA • Bazaar’s editor-in-chief Glenda Bailey is seeking a second assistant to hire cars, file expense reports, and wrangle interns. Oh, and are you psychic? The listing says candidates must “anticipate situations and offer preemptive solutions.” Well! Mediabistro has more details.
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Poverty Chic Puts New Perspective on Fashion Prices
Think designer clothes are too costly? Tired of being told by fashion magazines that a $1,500 trench coat is a worthwhile investment? You’re in luck! It’s officially hip to be poor!
Or, at least, it’s cool to be outrageously wealthy and merely dress like you’re poor. It’s like role-playing! Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, ever vanguards, flirted with dumpster chic in 2005, and Tyra Banks recently forced a whole coterie of models to pose as homeless. What’s behind this? Is it a reaction to the floundering economy or a misguided attempt at empathy?
Maybe it’s just the arrogance of people who’ve never sweated next month’s rent. Here’s Christina Applegate’s reminiscence of her child star days in “Christina Who?” from InStyle’s spring Shape Issue:
Her role models were the usual eighties teen-rebel idols—The Smiths, and Siouxsie and the Banshees—as well as the occasional unknowns she spotted on the street. “The same girlfriend and I were in the back of my mom’s car, and we saw this girl, and she had the coolest outfit and we said, ‘Mom, drive up closer.’ And it turned out she was a bag lady. We coveted the outfit of a bag lady.”
The “unknown” was actually a bag lady! Ha!
But at least Applegate’s homeless fashion fixation is a thing of the past. Nicole Richie, on the other hand, is still carrying a torch for the domicile-free look. As quoted in “Nicole Richie’s Domestic Bliss” in Bazaar, June:
She was sanguine about her bad behavior and frank about her friendships, and she confided that she fancied a sort of rocker boy who looks “really pale…really skinny,” adding, “I like people that kind of look homeless.”
So that explains her relationship with Joel Madden! Seriously, Nicole? Don’t pose for a fashion magazine at
your father’s spacious Beverly Hills estate while opining how great homeless people look. Don’t they lecture about that in finishing school? (In one of the photos, Lionel Richie is wearing a t-shirt that reads “Hello.” Outstanding!)
But there is one starlet who has never once harbored ambitions of living out of a shopping cart, though she does attempt to impersonate Charlie Chaplin in the baffling accompanying photo shoot. In “Comic Timing” (Allure, June), Jessica Alba bluntly expresses her desire for material success:
What she craved was an acting career and money. Maybe not in that order…“I grew up not having a lot,” Alba says, her face solemn. “I’m really happy to be making money, not depending on a man, and not having to suffer to survive in this business. Struggling is not fun. Been there, done that.”
But dressing like you’re struggling when, in fact, you’re loaded? Fun!
After heroin chic and the current homeless chic, what’s the next imitating-the-less-fortunate craze that celebs will engage in? Hungry chic?
Oh, wait. They’re already doing that, aren’t they?
Bazaar Justifies Luxury Price Tags, Own Existence
For a long time, we’ve been peeved by magazines’ skewed ideas of what constitutes affordable. (Never mind the debate over whether fashion prices are deliberately exclusionary.) So pervasive is the notion that $150 is a reasonable expense for a belt that we occasionally have to wonder why our wardrobe contains so few expensive pieces. Will we ever own a pair of red-soled Louboutins? Is there some expense we could cut from our budget to be better able to afford a Balenciaga bag? Are we flat-out deluded thinking that our ensembles look like they don’t come from H&M? Not that we want those things, exactly, but we want to be able to afford them.
And then we had a sobering experience. We were at MAGIC, talking to a sales rep. As she showed us a handful of modal t-shirts, we asked the wholesale price. “$37,” she replied.
Our response? “Oh, so that’s really accessible.” The sales rep nodded and moved on to pick up a hooded sweatshirt, and we started to hate ourselves. At a wholesale price of $37, that t-shirt likely retails for at least $70. Which, even if money were no object, is an awful lot of cash to spend on a mere tee, and $70 is certainly not a mass-market price for a little cotton shirt. But in the moment we deemed that particular price point “accessible,” we wholeheartedly believed it. We were sleep-deprived, we’d already spent days walking the never-ending aisles of the show seeing pieces whose prices were far more unjustified, and, well, the t-shirts were baby-blanket soft. (We just feel fortunate that we snapped back to reality before we broke out the Visa card at the Fashion Show Mall later in the week.)
All of which is a really long way of saying that, having been immersed in a fantasy land of desirable consumer goods, we sort of understand how writers for Bazaar choke up the nerve to refer to a $300 cardigan as a “steal.” So our interest was piqued by “Why Does It Cost So Much?” in the March issue. Why, indeed?
Unfortunately, the article devotes just one brief paragraph to the actual reasons why apparel and accessories bear exorbitant price tags. Discard any notions of getting an educational glimpse inside the industry! Rather, the focus is on “how to cope and still look cool.” Here’s what writer Nandini D’Souza had to say:
...I held up my beloved pair of silver Dries Van Noten leather sandals...“How much do you think these cost?” I asked my husband, playing devil’s advocate. “Flip-flops are cheap,” he analyzed in a finance-thinking way. “But since they’re designer, $40, maybe $50.”
Until then, I had never doubted the $300-plus I had shelled out a few years ago for them…I started questioning my sanity: More than $300 for flip-flops?...I had thought I was one of the more frugal fashion editors around. But I wondered, when did everything get so expensive, and when did I stop noticing?
This apparently sincere question is followed by a litany of agreement from people who can actually afford those $300 flip-flops. Which, you know, is annoying. Can you really complain that $500 is too much to pay for shoes when, in fact, you have the ability to buy $500 shoes? (Tangential whine: when did “social” become acceptable parlance for “socialite”?)
“Social” Nina Griscom says,
“The prices today are so astronomical.”
And designer Jenni Kayne weighs in:
“You can’t get a pair for less than $500; $300 used to be the normal expensive shoe.”
So who’s to blame for these ultra-pricey pieces? Designers! Phillip Lim explains himself.
“A dress can cost you $20,000. That’s a whole lot of money,” he says. “You can renovate your kitchen for that, or for some people that’s their salary or their child’s school tuition. You start to feel guilty.”
Start?
For one, lines like Lim’s 3.1 Phillip Lim and Kayne’s label are filling the yawning gap between high and low. Socialite turned designer Tory Burch says, “The whole reason I started my company is because fashion is expensive.”
Tory Burch also charges $195 for a striped cotton tee, so forgive us if we aren’t exactly in agreement with her assessment of “expensive.”
To be fair, the article does give some reasonably good (if not novel) advice about not buying things just because they’re on sale, and recommends that women develop a uniform that suits their body type and lifestyle so they don’t feel the need to give in to every passing trend. However, the article gets progressively more grating, predictably returning to the justification of the positively vulgar price tags of luxury goods. What else can be expected from people whose livelihoods are dependent on the public buying costly stuff they don’t need? A chorus of fashion people rationalize their expenditures thusly:
On a $1,300 pair of Chanel boots:
“But they’re worth it, and they make everything look chic.”
On an Oscar de la Renta dress:
“…I’ll have it for the rest of my life. You can wear it again, and it never looks like last season’s dress.”
On $800 Azzedine Alaia shoes:
“Outrageous. But I wear them a lot.”
About the $7,000-and-up Kelly and Birkin bags from Hermès:
“It’s more about what’s timeless than what’s trendy.”
And our favorite, on a handbag by Yves Saint Laurent:
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s only $1,595. It’s a deal!’” she recalls. “How sad is that?”
Very, very sad. Even worse is the article’s next implication. Can’t even manage to splash out on one of these “deal”s? You’re probably fat, too!
But let’s face it, not everyone can pull off those curved contours the way Jennifer Connelly did just weeks after Nicholas Ghesquiere introduced them. That doesn’t mean that that look can’t translate for a less-than-lithe nonceleb gal. “If you can’t afford the dress, get the shirt or scarf,” says [actress/designer Katie] Nehra. [emphasis ours]
Wait, we’re confused. What exactly is our problem again? Is it that we can’t afford or can’t fit into designer garb? Never mind! Here’s another plug for Phillip Lim!
…For spring, he has several alternatives to his own runway looks, including versions of a mint Grecian dress and a citron frock with a chain neckline.
At least he’s smart enough to knock off his own designs before Forever 21 does! Though we aren’t exactly sure how this reconciles with the guilt he mentioned earlier, especially when he suggests a way to acclimate to items whose prices contain a comma.
Lim’s advice for things that seem too expensive at first? “Sit on it for a few days, maybe a week.” [emphasis ours]
However, the most incredulity-inducing quote in the whole article has nothing to do with cash money:
Echoes Burch of seasonal hits, “They’re so identifiable, and I’d rather not wear something that screams what it is.”
This from a woman who puts her logo all over her line.
Ultimately, the article concludes that we should approach our wardrobes and our retirement plans in a similar manner.
The best way to stretch your dollar while still looking like a million of them is to think long-term investment...
Designer clothes as a long-term investment? Rather ludicrous coming from a magazine that tells us we need new clothes every single month.
Lindsay Lohan in Bazaar: Still Not Over Fall's Really Big Brows
You know those websites where you can upload a photo of yourself and then try on different hairstyles, and none of the new ‘dos fit your head quite right, and they’re all too big and at the wrong angle and you look horrible in each of the styles you try, and every single image ends up looking like you’re the victim of the world’s most malicious Photoshop job?
Yeah. Thanks to those dark roots peeking out above her ear, that’s all we see when we look at Lindsay Lohan on this upcoming issue of Bazaar. It’s like they just needed a face to fill in the hair that was already in place on the cover.
More from the annals of Bazaar's covers: Bazaar Triumphs in Contest for Least Appealing Cover Ever; Bazaar's Tradition of Off-Putting Covers Continues
Bazaar’s concept of “best” • Oh, to live in such a world! The “best buy of the day” on Bazaar’s site is a Marni necklace that retails for $1,296. The upside? Yesterday’s $295 cardigan from Tory Burch seems almost reasonable in comparison.
Bazaar: Aniston Says She's "Ba-ack," We Say She's Boring
Is it just us, or is every interview with Jennifer Aniston the same? Bazaar’s November issue features her in an article called “The Joy of Independence,” in which she talks about the same things she’s been talking about, like, forever. (Or, to be fair, she talks about the same things she’s been asked about forever.) Also, there’s the small—but crucial—matter of Aniston just not coming across as terribly interesting.
Let’s take a gander at what she has to say, shall we?
“I don’t think anybody thought Friends would become what it did,” she remembers. “It’s all good, though. It’s nothing but blessings.”
The article cites her salary of $1 million an episode for the show’s final two seasons. Yeah, we’d call that a blessing.
She starts to laugh. “But seriously, who actually dances in a fountain?”
Actors being paid exorbitant sums? Fortunately, everything else on Friends was utterly realistic!
There’s the now-standard breezy avowal that she still believes in love.
“My character is in a relationship with someone who doesn’t believe in marriage. It just doesn’t make any sense to me!”
Plus a nice plug for Smartwater, which Aniston endorses.
“I like these roles,” she explains, crossing her Alaia’d feet and sipping a Smartwater.
Let’s not omit the obligatory response to the tabloid interest in her life.
“I used to care a hell of a lot more what people said or thought,” she says of the time after her split from Pitt. “But that had to change when my life was under a microscope being scrutinized and my personal life was being talked about. You have to go, ‘This is not acceptable in any way,’ whether it’s about me personally or in business, success versus failure. It’s so negative. It’s such bizarre negativity.”
Oh, smart. In fact, writer Laura Brown goes so far as to call Aniston “sagelike” when she offers advice to “young stars.”
“Everything is just so dramatic,” she says, sagelike, “but you have to remember that we’re the luckiest people in the world to do what we get to do and get paid for it.”
We’re conflicted here. On the one hand, we’re glad Aniston makes such a down-to-earth acknowledgment; on the other hand, we’re quite sure we’ve read the same statement from every other celebrity on the planet, or at least the ones who haven’t been photographed puking on the sidewalk outside Les Deux at 3 a.m.
Other utterly pedestrian revelations:
1. Aniston dyed her hair black in high school. Ooh, edgy!
2. She would love to be Oprah for a day. You know, just to see what it’s like to be really wealthy!
3. Her “fantasy dinner-party guest” is Princess Diana. We should have seen that one coming.
And speaking of pedestrian, Aniston is pondering a move to New York, where, we presume, she will not dance in fountains.
She can barely get over the ecstatic thrill of “walking 40 blocks” when she was in New York the other week, with nobody noticing her.
Which, thanks to articles like this one, will probably never happen again.
America Ferrera on Glamour Cover: Digitally Created Déjà Vu
Here’s Ugly Betty star America Ferrera, painstakingly Photoshopped and sporting Versace on the cover of the October issue of Glamour. That’s quite a juxtaposition of Ferrera's computer-slimmed figure with the headline “1st Annual Figure Flattery Issue!” Well, whose figure wouldn’t be flattered by a digital diet?
Also, we could swear we’ve seen that dress before.
Oh, that’s because we have! Here’s Jessica Simpson wearing the same dress in a different hue (and with slightly different straps) from the August cover of Bazaar.
Our verdict? We prefer the purple. Also, we prefer that if a magazine is going to tell us how to “dress [our] body better,” that magazine might want to demonstrate by dressing an actual body for the cover. Just a thought!
Bazaar's Tradition of Off-Putting Covers Continues
It’s not quite on par with the Paris-Nicole fiasco, but the August cover of Bazaar is still appalling. Featuring Jessica Simpson with a bundle of balloons on the beach (and visible wrinkles around her eyes and mouth) and the magazine’s typically generic cover lines, this cover is clearly designed to attract—well, who exactly?
Bazaar Triumphs in Contest for Least Appealing Cover Ever
It was only the other day we mused about a cover whose words were a turnoff. Now comes its counterpart, a cover whose picture is so squirm-inducing it makes us not want to open (or even touch) the thing.
Paris and Nicole both? And their dogs? How can that even be remotely necessary? Just looking at their smarmy grins makes us want to shower with steel wool.
Bazaar Officially Out of Worthwhile People to Profile
The May issue of Bazaar includes utterly drool-worthy interviews with both Gwen Stefani and Dita Von Teese. And by drool, we mean that wayward strand of saliva that slips out when you fall into a deep slumber. The celeb articles are packed with mesmerizing revelations, such as two full paragraphs of discussion about Gwen’s hair—she bleaches it! who knew?—complete with a quote from her stylist, and then Dita makes the shocking confession she never imagined dancing partially clothed at age 34 as her profession. Really probing questioning there, Bazaar.
Still, it was “A Fashionable Life: Jacqui Getty” that got to us. Who is she, we wondered, and why does she merit ten pages? (Dita was allotted only four, by comparison, while Gwen garnered thirteen and the cover.)
Fortunately, Bazaar explained Getty’s worthiness:
She’s at the nexus of hipster Hollywood. And for costume designer Jacqui Getty, it’s all about a laid-back lifestyle that blends friends and family and fashion and film.
No, really, what is she doing in this issue?
…the elegantly furnished home says a lot about Jacqui Getty, a contributor to this magazine. [emphasis ours]
Ah! Like it’s not bad enough that we’re fed a constant diet of celebrities, the magazines are now cannibalizing their own staff and trying to convince us how attention-worthy their own employees are. At least make it fair, Bazaar. Instead of just cycling through the masthead, why not award this slot to the employee of the month?
Anyway, if you don’t already dislike Jacqui because she’s “at the nexus of hipster Hollywood”—which, since we live in Los Angeles, we can assure you is plenty contemptible—this description of her house should provide some fodder:
Neither a mansion filled with grand halls nor a museum filled with antiques…the home was bought for her by Francis Ford and Eleanor Coppola…
And this:
[Marrying a] Getty could have changed even the most well-grounded of girls, but Jacqui has stayed her artistic, bohemian self.
Wow! What persistence that must have taken, remaining “artistic” while living in a house decorated with the works of Basquiat, Ruscha, and Pollock.
And the evidence of Jacqui’s bohemian spirit? We suppose it’s the mere fact that, in the accompanying photo shoot, her husband is dressed as “fabled English sea captain Lord Nelson,” and her 20-year-old daughter is outfitted as a “naughty kitten,” a look apparently best achieved by wearing nothing but fishnets below the waist. Seriously.
Ever dutiful, Bazaar doesn’t neglect that most tired of clichés about Jacqui’s tremendous personal style.
For a couture shopping spree in Paris prior to her wedding, Jacqui showed up at Chanel in a grungeworthy down jacket and sneakers…
Because not only are grungy coats incredibly stylish, they’re appropriate for all occasions. We’re learning so much from her already!
And lest you think she’s merely a fashion vanguard, the article stresses that Jacqui is dedicated to her craft.
“…I have a work ethic,” she says, noting her 5:00 a.m. call time tomorrow morning for the latest Wes Anderson film, The Darjeeling Limited, where she has spent much of her time recently outfitting Owen Wilson in the bathroom of a tiny Staten Island restaurant.
As if the time your employer requires you to appear has anything to do with your devotion to the task. (We can say this with certainty, as we begrudgingly arrived at one job at 7:30 a.m. every day for 18 months.) And spending vast amounts of time tucked in a small space with a somewhat attractive movie star? Surely that requires Herculean commitment to the job!
Even aside from having to, you know, work for a living, it’s tough being a Getty. See, she can’t just socialize with anyone. Rather, Jacqui maintains impossibly high standards for her associates.
“I just love people who are creative and interesting,” explains Jacqui of her unscripted social life.
Which is noteworthy, since most of us prefer to pal around with people who are unimaginative and dull.
Further complicating Jacqui’s existence is that she’s deeply intellectual.
“I’m like, Hey, let’s go have fun! And [my husband]’s like, By the way, the science theory on this is…”
But let’s not forget she’s also unbelievably generous. The proof is this anecdote from close personal friend Demi Moore (who, we’re guessing, satisfies the rubric for “creative and interesting”):
The two women often shop together and inevitably end up spotting—and buying—the same things. “Neither of us cares if we have the same jacket,” says Moore.
What a giving soul! And to think some people have a totally skewed sense of perspective about such matters.
After such a fawning look at Jacqui, we eagerly await next month’s profile of a different staffer. Take your best shot, Bazaar—we refuse to believe there’s anyone on the payroll even less deserving of ten pages.
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