Today's Thursday Styles features Critical Shopper Alexandra Jacobs in a disagreeable mood as she goes to town on the new Bottega Veneta women's boutique on Madison Avenue. She barely touches on the store itself, however. First she turns her nose up at the concept of the "resort" collection, suggesting that it is an irrelevant contrivance for the rich who spent the winter months in sunny, tropical locales, and then brings up the horrific Costa Concordia crash to ruin winter vacations for all of us. Thanks.
...it’s a small, lightweight collection of clothes marketed at people who can afford long jaunts to the tropics when the rest of us are trudging through sludge and applying extra lashings of bronzer to our ghastly January pallor. It blithely ignores what the great wobbly mass of American humanity tends to wear while traveling — e.g., velour tracksuits and Disney mouse ears.
Wow. Sour grapes. Apparently she is aiming this week's column at Republican Primary voters, as if she has completely forgotten that Madison Avenue boutiques and luxury brands like Bottega Veneta were invented to serve the kind of people for whom the concept of "resort" remains incredibly relevant. In fact, they are probably sunning themselves on the beach right now. It's the kind of disingenuous reverse snobbery not seen since the loopy days of Alex Kuczynski. Of course, we aren't assuming that Jacobs live on Park Avenue and carries her own Birkin bag like we know her erstwhile predecessor did, but there's a certain sense that she has started out criticizing the shop for being exactly what it presents itself to be: a luxurious shop for wealthy customers. Madison Avenue is, and has always been, shopping for the 1%. Get over it or find a new neighborhood to shop in.
Critical Shopper: On the Sea of Tranquillity by Alexandra Jacobs (NYTimes)
Bottega Veneta 849 Madison Avenue between 69th & 70th Streets, Upper East Side
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