With its February issue, Vogue officially enters the ranks of the Politically Incorrect.
In a Big Way.
First there is the sky-high stilettos pictorial, in which photog Helmut Newton has snapped super Valkyrie Nadja Auermann in some, uh, compromising positions: wheelchair-bound and wearing $1,030 Chanel slingbacks; Nadja-wearing Manolo Blahniks-modeling a space-age leg brace and matching cane; Nadja hobbling on crutches in an ultra tight Dolce & Gabbana suit; and, the piece de resistance, Nadja standing next to her disembodied leg.
“A woman who wears these shoes has a tough time walking by herself,” says Newton in the article.
So why wear them?
But remember, Vogue (equals) Fantasy, a concept which becomes all too obvious in another article in the same issue, “Style in America: What Women Really Want.”
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To find out, writer Vicki Woods hit Atlanta, San Francisco, Houston and Chicago to interview women about their fashion preferences. Woods admits that she has never been to these cities before-and it shows.
In my hometown of Atlanta, a city that’s 67 percent African-American and known for its proliferation of wealthy women of color, all eight of the Vogue panelists’ faces are strikingly absent of color. The same holds true for the panel in San Francisco, where Asians are the largest minority. As it does for the panel in the very Hispanic Houston.
The lone ethnic face among the 26 panelists: our very own Linda Jackson, wife of Bo-who no longer lives in Chicago.
I would suggest a new headline: Style in Certain Neighborhoods of America: What Rich White Women Really Want.”
Chicago dreamin’
He’s a New Yorker with a permanent California surfer tan.
“I’m probably going to end up on the Allure (magazine) Too Tan page,” deadpanned designer Michael Kors, in town recently to pump his spring line.
Kors’ favorite thing to do in Chicago: catch rays at the Oak Street beach.
“I think it’s amazing you can go to the beach and go shopping all in the same day,” says Kors. “It’s the only place in America where you’re downtown and at the beach.”
Another entry in the Fashion Hall of Shame
Spotted at All Jokes Aside in the South Loop on Saturday night: a woman as short as she is wide, sporting a white mystery mink coat imprinted with black and white faces. Her coif was equally, ahem, original: silver-grey yarn (the kind you played with in arts and crafts classes in kindergarten) woven through her braids, which were fastened at the top with giant-sized gold balls. What can I say? She was at a comedy club.