THE DECLINE CONTINUES Awash in rumors that Calvin Klein is up for sale (hasn’t he always been?), the company has truly scraped the bottom of the barrel with the marketing of their “new” old jeans. Though it seems that Klein is only following the trend set by the mysteriously popular Helmut Lang, who debuted the jeans in September (I have been harping about it ever since), the “new” jeans have an extra, added attraction — they are tinted to look filthy. Available in several shades of grime, and retailing at $78, the rags have worked their way down the food chain and have been knocked-off by those paragons of Express, at $48, and Old Navy, at $29.50. Lovely. You can bet that Calvin doesn’t sell this trash in his über-minimalist, too-chic-for-you emporium on Madison Avenue.
HIGH-STAKES SHOPPING “We buy the stuff we need, like food and Kleenex, but there’s another level of shopping, where we’re engaged in a quest for things that will change our life or redefine who we are — the odd, the exotic, the original, the one-of-a-kind bounties that hardly ever turn up but are so thrilling when they do.” With that said, we’re off on the ultimate shopping spree, with Vogue editor-at-large Dodie Kazanjian in the introduction to her book Dodie Goes Shopping and Other Adventures. In it, Dodie shops for ball gowns, fur coats, and facelifts in a way that is as close as most of us will get to these rarefied experiences. ” … We should pursue them with skepticism as well as ardor, because the ideal (what we’re really after here) is the ultimate fantasy … I’m almost positive that when I get them right, my life will be perfect — for a few hours, anyway.”
“Shopping is at least 50% fantasy,” she says, and anyone can shop for the things that Miss Kazanjian does, but perhaps there is the deep-rooted fear that we’ll get atreated like the Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman in which she’s sneered at and laughed off of Rodeo Drive, even when she shows that she has money to spend. If that’s what is keeping you from going out and seeing what a $200,000 fur coat feels like, get over it. Or get Dodie’s book. She grew up, as many women did, believing that ultimately, she would own a fur coat. Though the notion of wearing fur has been a volatile issue in the recent past, the desire to own and wear fur does not abate. Fur remains the ultimate luxury, perhaps, to paraphrase Isaac Mizrahi, because of the perversity of it. And, as Dodie shows us, there’s plenty of it out there to choose from. Beginning at Gucci on Fifth Avenue, Dodie tries on brightly colored fox “chubbies” in blue, red, yellow, and black, at $9,000 each. Sensing that they didn’t look good on anyone under eight feet tall, she heads over to Fendi, the holy temple of luxury fur. She first tries on a newer, “modern” style of fur that is sheared, unlined, and extraordinarily lightweight, with hidden details like fur-lined pockets. At $35,000, it’s the cheapest thing in the store, but before she drops that kind of money, she’ll need to consult her husband.
Trying on ballgowns can be grueling work. Fortunately we have Dodie to do it for us. With her, we breeze through the intimidating doors of Givenchy, where she discovers that the clothes we see on the runway are definitely not the ones we see in the stores. We feel her nakedness as she tries on the wisps of dresses at Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, and La Perla. We are her companions as she discovers the VIP lounge at Valentino, and discovers that she doesn’t belong there but gets treated royally anyway — but, frankly, if I were an editor at Vogue, I’d make sure the place knew about it well in advance of my arrival. Interesting to note that Ms. Kazanjian couldn’t find anything in her diminutive size at Calvin Klein, and was “not comfortable with this store’s cool minimalism, and I’m a little tired of being ignored by haughty salespersons.” We try on Armani, Galliano, and Dior, but pass on Gucci, where the look for evening is a rhinestone bikini with a sheer dress over it. We eventually wind up at Badgley Mischka, buying an amber-colored georgette confection, strewn with rice pearls and topaz crystals. It was almost like being there.
Where you don’t want to wind up with 40-year-old Dodie is on her rounds of the top plastic surgeons in New York. Their assessments of what needed to be done varied wildly, from a complete face- and brow-lift with a little eye-work, for just under $25,000, to one surgeon, who told her, “Listen, if you were my sister, I’d tell you to go home. You don’t need any face surgery.” Good advice for a funny, down-to-earth woman who writes with a great deal of charm.
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This article appears in January 21 • 2000.