Cintra Wilson Goes Shopping: Tell Us Something We Don't Know Edition
June 28, 2007
Photo by Donna Alberico for The New York Times
We got a little lift this morning when we saw the byline for this morning's Critical Shopper in the Times' Thursday Styles. Cintra Wilson should have been a perfect choice to point her acid tongue at unsuspecting retailers all over the city, and yet somehow she may have been too perfect for an easy target like the Valentino boutique on Madison Avenue.
Wilson, of the bee stung lips and Dietrich brows who can be scathingly funny in her book, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease Other Cultural Revelations, is no stranger to glamor. After dispensing with history and current events - the recent sale of his company, his 45th anniversary etc. - she lays into Valentino's clothes, which, apparently, are not hip enough for her.
This is some sort of surprise?
Valentino appears to see the ideal Society Wife today as a streamlined luxury toddler. Current pieces evoke the Pampered-with-a-capital-P innocence of the nursery, yet defy the vigor of either youth or sex. In the baby-doll dresses, there is no ironic infantilism (that flirty “kinderwhore” cuteness that winks at pedophilia) but a kind of learned helplessness that waves a limp hand at actual infirmity.
But this is the sort of criticism that designer Valentino Garavani has been deftly deflecting for decades. He is the first one to say, "I just like to make women look pretty," discouraging anyone from plumbing depths that he claims simply aren't there. And yet, he is skillful enough to claim something as common as the color red as a personal design signature.
As for the claim that his clientele is aging, soon to be extinct,
haven't people been saying that for decades too? And yet his brand
continues to grow while young Hollywood fights over his latest samples
to wear to awards shows. When it was recently purchased by an
investment group, the headlines read, "Valentino Sold" instead of
noting that the sale also included Hugo Boss, a much bigger brand which
was also a part of the Valentino Fashion Group, itself renamed when the
Marzotto family acquired the Italian Couture house and decided to use
it to identify their company.
Happily, Wilson's signature wit comes into play as she steps into the dressing room
The black pants I tried on were marvelously cut and would have been a flawless basic (for a near-reasonable $890) if not for the ruffle around the waist, which relegated them to the enviable ghetto of, “I’ll wear them sensationally once, then pugs can nest upon them.”
I was curious about a beige lace minidress with a jeweled strap over one shoulder ($4,490). Something I might wear to an inaugural toga party? It was spayed yet subversive. In it, I resembled a French Quarter beignet forced to resort to prostitution to support my powdered-sugar habit.
Most perplexing was the section of the shop devoted to buttercup-yellow pleated mini-muumuus and candy-apple-red suits with padded lapels and cuffs. The colors and shapes made no sense until I realized that only a life so ideal as to be completely divorced from consciousness of the McDonald’s franchise could account for this combination.
Mocking the wealthy is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it is still worthwhile of you can do it well.
Critical Shopper: A Vanishing Tribe, but Well Dressed for Exinction by Cintra Wilson
Valentino 747 Madison Avenue at 65th Street, Upper East Side
Ah, Shophound, you chic witster you. Of course you're right; Valentino is too easy a target. I was probably just still sore after the female circumcision I was forced to submit to before the police would allow me in stores above 47th Street.
In any case, Ciao, darling.....keep your mots bon and your bons bonnier. Lovely blog you've got here. Smooches!
xxx cintra
Posted by: Cintra Wilson | June 29, 2007 at 11:34 AM