Take the fall-winter Valentino couture presentation by Pier Paolo Piccioli, which also took place in Venice, just a month ago. The fashion industry has been respectfully careful up to this point to keep up appearances of restraint. More recently, Barack Obama took heat for his (scaled-down) 60th birthday party in Martha’s Vineyard, where the guest list still included Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Springsteen, Chrissy Teigen and the Clooneys. Kim Kardashian was criticized for posting about her 40th birthday party in Tahiti (she flew in 40 close friends she flew out with COVID). David Geffen was lambasted for posting about his lockdown life on his $200-million yacht. In the early days of the pandemic, celebrities, facing backlash, tried to tone down the flash. The wealthy are hubristic and arrogant - something happens to them as a result of the acquisition of wealth (for they are so disposed as to think that they possess all good things …).” This is from “Rhetoric 2.16”: “The kinds of character that accompany wealth are plain for all to see. (Then there’s that billionaire space race.) This obliviousness isn’t a good look, something Aristotle recognized in the fourth century B.C. The class divide isn’t new, of course, but it’s become a yawning chasm where a few thousand billionaires control 60 per cent of the world’s wealth. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” Fitzgerald is musing about generational wealth, but what he writes next is what the new rich should fear us figuring them out: “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” In fuller form it goes: “Let me tell you about the very rich. Scott Fitzgerald, from a 1925 short story called “The Rich Boy,” which is too often abbreviated. The most famous quote about the divide between the Haves and the Have Nots is by F. It begs the question: do we really want “influencers” to parade their privilege right now?
I believe that we have been changed - even a little - by the pandemic body count, core-shaking social justice movements, the end of the me-first madness of the Trump era and, most of all, by the existential threat of climate change. We swooned over their immaculately tasteful compounds at Hyannis Port or Palm Springs we thrilled to peek inside mega-mansions chockablock with rare sportscars and rows of candy-coloured Birkins.īut something feels very wrong with all the excess now. We subsisted on the crumbs of their exotic vacation photos on private yachts and private planes and private resorts. We pored over paparazzi shots of the swells as they arrived at their galas and nightclubs to do secret rich-people things behind velvet ropes and a row of bouncers. Their private jet jaunts, torrid affairs and teapot-tempest scandals provided fodder for us to consume during idle moments stuck at the checkout counter. The lives of the rich and famous used to be harmless escapist fantasy. As COVID-19 numbers rise and our hearts sink, the displays of the ultra-rich rub our noses in the fact that the rules - especially the COVID rules that we continue to faithfully follow at great emotional expense - do not apply to them. To paraphrase Nero, a group of the wealthy and the privileged fiddle away in Venice while the world burns. We watch the news like a horror movie, hands over our eyes, as a frantic airlift ends the war in Afghanistan, forest fires swallow acres and belch acrid smoke into the atmosphere, hurricanes drench wherever isn’t in a state of drought and the pandemic rages relentlessly on. Most of us are still dutifully hunkered down, 18 months into a global pandemic, on this sleepy last week of real summer, before school starts back up and work kicks into high gear.
Dolce and gabanna light blue tacky series#
But Dolce & Gabbana’s series of shows and parties - a gluttony of glitter and over-the-top flounce - landed as a clanking hangover.
Yes, couture has always been gloriously over the top. Or was it worse than plain tacky - was it actually rage-inducing? Was it witty, or post-ironic, when they put 18th-century style Marie Antoinette wigs and corseted, petticoated ball gowns on the chamber musicians playing in the background? Were the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana being brazen - or just oblivious - when they gathered 450 celebrities and couture clients with large entourages of fluffers and flunkies in Venice this past week for Alta Moda, their multi-day extravaganza of couture presentations and rich people parties-slash-social media photo ops?
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