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?
