I’m loving how Anna Wintour of Vogue and Devil-Wears-Prada fame has turned the once flush-with-cash Emirate into a handy, one word adjective describing unbridled, unabashed, unnecessary and utterly conspicuous consumption.

And just in time for the Oscars too. As you’re Twittering your personal take on red carpet style to your friends this Sunday, you’ll be grateful for Ms. Wintour’s updating of common English vernacular.

What might have once been: “Is Nicole Kidman really wearing gold lamé with emerald-encrusted bronze platforms and a two-foot-tall peacock-feathered headdress???” can now be easily pared down to: “Nic Kidman - DUBAI!!!!”

Of course, you could also twitter the following if you’ve been reading Ms. Wintour’s publication with semblance of regularity over the past few decades: “Vogue - DUBAI!!!”

Asked how she is tweaking the high-society-navel-gazing rag in deference to the corner-cutting mood of its common (and cash cow) readership, Ms. Wintour offered her refusal to shoot a nipple-grazing sequined “thing” (retail price - wait for it - $25,000) as an example of a more pared down, somber mood prevailing at the offices of Vogue.

And we wonder why John Thain thought he could get away with laying off thousands of Merrill Lynch employees and asking for a ten million dollar bonus in the same breath?

Say what? The laid-off employees ought to be kissing the soles of Thain’s Ferragamos for his heroic rescue of the financial institution? For what would the common masses do without their financial institutions? Without Vogue’s enlightening pieces on how H&M pants are for suckers while Oscar de la Renta is for-evah, daarling? The common masses need Thain and Vogue, just like the seventeenth-century French masses needed Marie-Antoinette. The masses ought to be grateful that someone out there can still wear what Anna calls “aspirational” clothing, even if that someone is English-heiress-turned-Vogue-reporter-turned-author-of-the-barfworthy-Bergdof-Blondes, Plum Sykes.

Now that we’re all in agreement that Dubai had all the long-term investment appeal of a pair of drop-crotch MC Hammer pants, can we give Montreal its Formula 1 spot back?

Obama as a mu-mu.

Do we love it or do we hate it?

It’s refreshing to see intelligent business strategies vindicated by positive results.H&M, the Swedish Wunderstore, has annouced new store openings all over the globe, higher than projected earnings, and - believe it or not - more hiring! It seems that by helping people be fashionable without breaking the bank, they’ve managed to keep themselves afloat in a sea of doom and gloom.

Of course, the strategy needs to be backed up by an intelligent management and operations team, otherwise why would Target - arguably a competitor to H&M - be tanking while Walmart profits soar?

In a previous post I blogged about the state of the luxury business, and how it sought to expand into “non-traditional markets” (i.e. sell luxury items to people who have no business buying luxury items in the first place) and even declared itself resistant to economic downturns since rich people are presumably above such mundane, pedestrian things as worrying about where their next dividend payout will come from.

As Louis Vuitton, Dior, et al. have learned the hard way, it doesn’t do to base a long-term strategy on shaky assumptions, such as, everyone will want to emulate celebrities’ free-spending ways until the end of time, so let’s invest a whole lot of money, energy, and a big chunk of our “brand” that we’ve spent decades honing into this strategy.

It might have been okay if they had gone for the easy profits of mass-luxury in a lucid manner: knowing they could only ride the wave for so long, and figuring out an exit strategy for when things turned sour. It might have also helped if they hadn’t eaten into their brand image by moving jobs to China so they could fatten up their margins (without, mind you, passing the savings onto the customer).

It’s funny how everything in life follows the same old cycle. Things move forward, but in widening circles as opposed to an upwards-moving line.

Take jeans.

Go ahead and google Brooke Shields and Calvin Klein to see what “normal” jeans looked like 20 years ago.

Here’s a picture in case you’re lazy:

All together now, what do we call these jeans, nowadays?

That’s right - Mom jeans!

We all remember how Britney Spears took an extreme runway trend (by Alexander McQueen) and brought it into the mainstream:

Luckily, that fad has died a merciful death, but our view of how high “normal” jeans should rise has been changed forever.

Luxury will not die. People will get sick of cheap, ill-fitting H&M clothes. I am addicted to designer jeans and will continue to buy them so long as I can afford to. But luxury will be humbled, and it’s about time.

The first time I read Ben Stein’s latest article in the NYT, I was fuming. I even felt - in spite of myself - a twinge of understanding for Sarah Palin’s attempt to sever “real Americans” from their less-real compatriots (knowing full well the extent of her hypocrisy, of course, but still).

There it was, the “sweet woman” at her wits’ end because her ex-husband’s dwindling income put her $20,000/month alimony check in jeopardy, her now “worthless” 2.7 million dollar home, and the fact that she was considering sending her credit-card-bill-footing boyfriend packing.

Oh, and she hasn’t been employed in decades (it’s a day job in itself, to spend $20,000 a month, isn’t it?) and she doesn’t have a penny in savings. And now of course, she was worried about her future.

I had to wonder what planet this woman had been living on all these years.

I reread the piece a couple of days later, just to make sure it hadn’t been a satirical jab at the lifestyles of the once rich and wannabe famous (like this one).

Instead of indignant fury, the second reading left me feeling sorry for this “sweet woman” who may or may not be sweet, but is certainly a victim of sorts.

But whose victim? Her good-for-nothing ex-husband? Consumerism? Alan Greenspan’s monetary policies that resulted in the biggest bubble in American history and the ensuing housing market hemorrhage? Disney’s princess propaganda?

It was that last one that struck a chord. In college, I took a humanities class about gender issues and politics. Our (male) teacher exemplified everything on a republican die-hard’s hate list: wimpy and androgynous looking, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, passionate (in a very nice, non-confrontational way) about gender politics, especially the trap so many of today’s middle-aged women find themselves in.

Once upon a time, these were fresh, wide-eyed women with a secret (or perhaps, not-so-secretive) hankering for some of those values we now call traditional. In other words, while they would never call themselves meek or submissive, they harbored fantasies of being looked after by a strong man. They were well-rounded, well-educated, and sometimes even had careers. Career’s that they would sacrifice - some more willingly than others - once their husbands’ and children’s needs, and their homemaker fanatsies outweighed their own independence. And when the husbands left, their worlds crumbled around them.

There isn’t anything wrong with wanting to be taken care of - I harbour fantasies of someone (preferably a hot, male someone who cooks and cleans) looking after me - that’s just how many of us are wired (and if you don’t think men are wired that way too, look closer at how they love to be “mommied” or how so many of them take off when they can’t handle the heat of being the strong one anymore).

The difference between this woman and me is that while we both have similar fantasies, I settle for watching Michael Douglas hack a way through the Colombian jungle for Kathleen Turner while polishing off a glass (or three) of pink wine. The next day, I dust myself off and go to work. I grumble and complain, and sometimes wonder why I hadn’t stayed in the material comfort of a marriage that offered security and companionship, instead of heading out alone into the fog of an unknown future.

Post-feminism is a kind of backlash against the hardcore feminism of the 60s. What’s wrong with being a girly girl? Not only is it fun, but let’s face it, it’s a better deal. Who the heck wants to toil away at a day job for a pittance, only to have to come home to chores (that men still aren’t doing, feminism be damned).

But lest these women forget, being a girly girl in the extreme is not without its price, and rather than tear a page form “sweet woman”’s playbook, they’d fare better by holding her case up as a cautionary tale of pre and post-feminism gone awry.

In the opening chapter of my current work-in-progress, I was toying with the idea of having a character (a designer) describe his latest collection as “Slumdog Chic”, in reference of course to the runaway anti-Bollywood hit Slumdog Millionnaire. The collection is a sort of bum-as-the-new-black meets Indian slums, which I admit is a little insensitive and exploitative of the tragic plight of so many people (and so is a perfect metaphor for insensitive consumption), but Marie-Claire does me one better with their February cover.

Behold the new chic - Credit Crunch Chic.

Cash-strapped? About to be foreclosed on? Stuck in a loveless marriage because your assets are now worth less than a month’s supply of kitty-litter and now you can’t move out?

Boy does Marie-Claire have a deal for you! YSL has “downsized” its “no-frills, discreetly chic Easy bag” (presumably so the under-fed, over-stretched masses don’t pull a Marie-Antoinette on your ass and stuff the YSL “Easy” bag down your throat).

Suggested retail price for this bit of inconspicuous under-consumption?

$995.

There’s even a cheaper version for you SUPER bargain huntresses out there: $895.

No wonder this economy thing hasn’t bottomed out yet: we still don’t get it. Or maybe, we do get but Marie-Claire et al. think it’s a matter of time before we’re fed up with being sensible and go back to free-spending ways.

What do you think?

Great article in the NY Times today: is luxury headed for extinction?

Probably not - for as long as people measure their worth by how worthless everyone else is, there will be a need to demonstrate that “worth” somehow.

But the really interesting point comes toward the end - when a Valentino column gown is slashed down to 70% of its original price (and remember - we haven’t hit the post-Holidays mega-sales yet), and Prada alligator wallets are piled on top of each other willy-nilly à la Wal-Mart discount bin section, will the average luxury customer ever allow themselves to be duped into paying exhorbitant sums of money for these “exclusive” items again?

Probably - societies tend to have pretty short attention spans, but something tells me the sting of these times will be staying with us a lot longer than Saks, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf et al. would like.