As the 1980s melted into the 1990s, a new breed of supermodel started stalking the earth. Her emaciated frame made Twiggy’s look chunky; she appeared permanently prepubescent; her sunken-eyed pallor made her look like a junkie. She was embodied by Kate Moss.
Moss and her band of wraiths not only drove insanely beautiful but fleshy models like Cindy Crawford and Kathy Ireland from magazine covers, they also slammed a heavy door on Nancy Reagan’s 1980s-era “Just Say No” campaign against drug use. Their message was louder and prettier than the prudish abstinence-pushing project led by Reagan. It was accompanied by the melodies of the drug-fueled conflagration that was the Seattle music scene. They were waifs. They were heroin chic.
Now, 15 years later, in a set of circumstances that have exposed the hypocrisy and sanctimony of everyone involved, Moss and the fashion industry are becoming accidental and unwilling poster children for a new anti-drug message.
Two weeks ago, during New York City’s Fashion Week, London’s Daily Mirror newspaper splashed its cover with an image of Moss — still a supermodel at 31, as well as mother to a 2-year-old daughter — cutting lines of cocaine on a CD jewel box. “Cocaine Kate: Supermodel Kate Moss snorts line after line,” blared the cover. An inset photo showed her leaning down to inhale the lines of white powder through a rolled up 5-pound note. Moss’ career is now in sudden free fall. She has since had her contracts with H&M and Burberry canceled; her longtime relationship with Chanel will not continue past October; and she’s been publicly spanked by employers like Rimmel and Gloria Vanderbilt.
News that models do blow is akin to news that rock stars have casual sex: not news at all. But the Moss humiliation was special. While photographers and models haunt the same VIP rooms, presumably sometimes partaking in illegal activities together, rarely do we see photographic evidence of cocaine getting sucked into recognizable nostrils. In this case, the Mirror — perhaps smarting from the pricey loss of a libel suit Moss brought in response to its allegation that she had fallen into a drug-induced coma in 2001 — had sent someone on an “undercover investigation.”
The “investigation” captured not only grainy still images of Moss’ inhalations, but a videotape of the debauched evening, which took place at a West London recording studio where her boyfriend’s band Babyshambles was laying down tracks. The boyfriend, Pete Doherty, is the heroin- and cocaine-addicted musician, burglar and all-around yuck-bomb whom the model has been seeing off and on for months. The press has been full of dire warnings to Moss about the perils of her relationship with him, with Doherty’s ex describing him as “evil.” Moss’ press-happy friend Sadie Frost told reporters that Doherty is “not the sort of guy you’d wish for your best friend. He’s very wild. Kate’s got a history of partying hard. The idea of them together is terrible.”
Of course, all this attention has made their romance all the more compelling, which in turn has lent the tale of Moss’ druggy downfall at the hands of Doherty and his skuzzy friends an even more satisfying frisson of comeuppance. Thanks to Internet technology, the images and lurid reports of Moss’ coked-out antics, including her twitchy nose-rubbing, conversational inanities, and chopping of 20 lines (she snorted five), have shot round the world in nanoseconds.
It’s this readily available evidence, perhaps, that has made the usually lifestyle-blind fashion industry turn so violently on Moss. Though she has not made a public statement about her recent narcotic consumption, Moss has spent the week meeting with the companies she represents. Swedish clothing chain H&M had announced it would give her a second chance, but canceled her contract on Tuesday, citing customer complaints. Chanel, a company for which Moss has modeled since 2001, released a statement claiming that it will not renew her contract once her current cycle of ads is retired in October. And while Burberry’s public statement was solicitous, pointing out that Moss has “worked successfully” with them over the years, and that she “has always been highly professional,” they too brought their relationship with her to an end, a decision that will cost them a considerable amount of money, since they will have to reshoot an already finished ad campaign.
Now it’s mostly a question of falling dominoes. Moss, who reportedly makes $9 million a year, will surely lose most, if not all, of her current gigs. Who will want to keep her on, when to do so would signal brazen public support of a woman whose drug use is now being investigated by Scotland Yard?
Of course, Moss’ real error was in getting caught on tape, a situation that is certainly unfortunate for her, but just as inconvenient for fashion companies, now forced to place their favorite clotheshorse in the stocks, and to distance themselves from her by proclaiming their wide-eyed innocence.
What this drama has done is lay bare the ugly skeleton that holds up a fashion industry that for some time has prized hollow cheeks and vacant eyes, stunted, prepubescent frames, and jutting collar bones from which fabric drapes beautifully. In other words, the body that is appealing to designers — and thus to consumers — is a body that looks like it has been ravaged by drugs. In order to stay employed, models must maintain this shape; to maintain the shape they must do something besides eat right and exercise regularly. Whether it’s cocaine or speed or heroin or caffeine or cigarettes or anorexia or bulimia or some combination of the above, most adult women cannot get bodies that look like Moss’ healthily, because hers is not a healthy body.
On Thursday, a spokeswoman for cosmetics firm Rimmel announced that the company was “shocked and dismayed by the recent press allegations surrounding” Moss, and that it would reconsider its relationship with her. Earlier, the CEO for Gloria Vanderbilt denim had told the press, “We would have second thoughts about using Kate Moss” again, and that “we weren’t aware of any issues with Kate prior to this campaign.”
The fashion companies’ professions of surprise are hard to believe. Would it be more embarrassing for them to admit they hired a model who they knew had done drugs than it is for them to admit to never having picked up a paper? Moss has spoken of her own drug use many times, and did a widely reported stint in rehab in 1998. She has denied heroin use, and often claimed she was clean, but in 2003 she gave an interview in which she said that dabbling was fine, but that an earlier period she’d spent immersed in drug use “wasn’t a nice time.”
Moss’ record alone renders Gloria Vanderbilt’s and Rimmel’s assertions of naiveté ludicrous. And what about H&M’s statement to the New York Times, that “If someone is going to be the face of H&M, it is important they be healthy, wholesome and sound”? The spokeswoman also told the Times that after feedback, “we decided we should distance ourselves from any kind of drug abuse.”
Remember Capt. Renault’s assertion to Rick Blaine in “Casablanca” that he is “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,” just before the croupier hands him his winnings?
If it were important that the face of H&M be healthy, wholesome and sound, the company would have very few working models to choose from, and everyone — both in and out of the fashion industry — knows that.
This week, London Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair told the Mirror that they’re pursuing an investigation of Moss’ drug use because “We have to look at the impact of this kind of behavior on impressionable young people.” But measuring the impact of Moss and her behavior is long overdue. How many eating disorders have been launched by a fashion industry that put Moss’ look — no fat, no flesh, no physical sign that she has consumed nutrients — on every billboard and runway? For more than a decade, awkward 15-year-olds have scanned the pages of fashion magazines, trying to figure out what they are expected to look like if they want to be considered attractive. And what they found was Moss and the consumptive figure she made popular.
In truth, the impression that Moss has made in the past two weeks has probably been one of the healthier ones in her history — simply because this chapter of her life has made drug use and addiction look not like giggling fun for beautiful people, but like a habit that can be sad and grimy, and which can produce terrible personal and professional results. Those pictures of her were ugly. They looked sad. The rolled-up fiver was skanky, as was her outfit. This was not the glamourous Mediterranean bar-top bacchanal that some might fantasize about when they think about a model’s hard-living lifestyle. This was a filthy room with gross people.
And her professional offloading certainly hasn’t seemed like it’s been fun. Reports had Moss in tears when she heard that Chanel would not be renewing with her. The industry that sent her to the stratosphere has cut her loose without much of a second thought. When cornered by reporters after the Mirror story first appeared, a distraught Moss told them to, “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off! Just fuck off!” Her father, caught at his home in West Sussex, England, and shown the pictures of his daughter doing illegal drugs, said only, “It doesn’t surprise me.” A London Sun report today had Moss smoking crack, a drug that has no street glamour at all. The only good news, as reported in the gossip columns, is that she may have broken up with Doherty again.
But between her personal humiliation, professional tumble, declining economic prospects, soured romance, and dire image problems, Kate Moss — avatar of 1990s heroin grunge — has this week become a walking D.A.R.E. ad.
[UPDATE BELOW]
It was always bound to go there, but few likely expected it would be so blatant. I’m talking about the ongoing campaign against organized labor; for decades deeply rooted in American political culture, the crusade has been periodically amplified in popular culture as well, from 1954′s “On the Waterfront” all the way to the Sopranos’ depiction of mob-controlled unions (and sometimes pop culture and political culture have even fused). So it was only a matter of time before vilifying rank-and-file union members would be commodified into a consumer brand by a company looking for an edge in the high-end retail market.
That’s where Kenneth Cole now comes in. The clothing designer has just launched a new crusade to tie his expensive clothing and shoes line to the elite’s movement du jour: the fight to demonize public schoolteachers and their unions. In a billboard and Web-based campaign, Cole’s foundation portrays the national debate over education as one that supposedly pits “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights.”
“Should underperforming teachers be protected?” asks the foundation’s website.
When asked about the campaign, one of Cole’s spokeswomen insisted the company isn’t trying to insult teachers or unions, saying, “It’s something in the news and being debated, and we wanted to provide a forum where people could discuss it as well.” But with the company using the same loaded language as the conservative political activists trying to undermine public education and teachers’ unions, the corporate P.R.-speak is, to say the least, unconvincing.
No, Cole’s campaign is thinly veiled ideological propaganda, and it comes with myriad problems, not the least of which is the simple fact that almost nobody believes “underperforming teachers” should be protected. That includes the nation’s biggest teachers’ unions, which have been outspoken in backing “accountability” reforms for teacher tenure. So right off the bat, Cole is constructing a straw man, one that has served over the years to pretend that public employee unions in general and teachers’ unions specifically are about nothing more than making sure bad employees get to keep their jobs.
Of course, there is a legitimate debate among state lawmakers and school boards about how to determine what an “underperforming teacher” is. Should a teacher be considered subpar if her students perform poorly on standardized tests? Should any teacher-to-teacher peer review be included in performance evaluations? And should any factors other than tests and grades — say, student poverty levels — be considered when using student achievement to judge a particular teacher?
As evidenced by the language of his new campaign, Cole, like the anti-union activists in the larger corporate-sponsored education “reform” movement, doesn’t want those questions asked, much less answered, for pondering them raises the very queries about power and wealth that Cole’s fellow 1 percenters don’t want to discuss.
For instance, actually taking an honest look at America’s education system brings up queries about why other less economically stratified nations have unionized teachers and far better academic results than here in America. It also forces us to ask why it just so happens that wealthy unionized districts in America do so well — but poorer districts have such problems. All of that consequently compels us to consider issues like poverty and funding disparities between rich and poor districts — issues that inherently threaten the status quo, and thus the interests of the super-wealthy. And so under the veneer of the term “reform” and with the backing of seemingly altruistic philanthropy via foundations like Cole’s, the super-wealthy work to avoid substance and instead define the education policy discourse on reductionist slogans like “underperforming teachers.”
Perhaps the biggest problem with Cole’s campaign, though, is how it forwards the “us-versus-them” notion that teachers’ rights to due process in the workplace are automatically at odds with their students’ interests. This so fundamentally misunderstands how education works that it perfectly underscores why a clothing corporation doesn’t have much credibility on education issues.
Think about it: We need our best teachers to work in the public schools that educate the most at-risk populations. Why? Because with decades of social science research proving that achievement is driven mostly by out-of-classroom factors (poverty, family dysfunction, etc.), those are the schools that need the most skilled pedagogues to overcome comparatively difficult odds for success. But why would a good teacher opt to work in such a school without basic protections — protections designed to make sure the at-risk population’s achievement-suppressing disadvantages aren’t used as a rationale to fire her? She probably wouldn’t.
In this way, “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights” is the mirror opposite of how things actually work. Without extending teachers’ rights to, say, be evaluated fairly or to challenge a termination, it would be difficult — if not impossible — for public schools to recruit the best teachers to the specific at-risk schools that need them the most.
Most likely, these inconvenient truths are of little concern to someone like Kenneth Cole. According to Gotham Schools, he sends his kids to private school, making him part of the larger trend of elites who are trying to foist radical policies onto public schools, knowing their own kin won’t be hurt by those policies.
But, you ask, wouldn’t a clothing mogul with no kids in public school be averse to a divisive crusade against teachers, if only to circumvent a controversy? Even if he is a political activist, wouldn’t he refrain from such a campaign for fear of losing customers?
These are fair questions, and they highlight how Cole’s campaign may say something hugely important — and troubling — about the long-term future of education politics in America.
Recall that Cole is in a zeitgeist industry that is all about lashing branded chic to the popular fad of the moment. That means his move probably reflects what he believes to be an ascendant cause célèbre — one that he thinks he isn’t joining in spite of his company, but in support of its profit-making objectives. Put another way, he probably believes he will gain customers if he ties his company to anti-teacher, anti-union themes.
Sure, that gamble could be wrong — and I hope it is. I hope America sees just how wrongheaded and ideologically extreme the crusade against public schools, teachers and unions is.
But as a successful mogul, Cole’s clearly got skill as a cultural seer; and if someone like him sees mass profit potential in not-so-subtly bashing teachers and unions, it’s a scary sign that such unhinged anti-teacher sentiment could be going more mainstream than ever.
Update: After a mass outcry from teachers, Kenneth Cole announced on Twitter Monday that it is removing the billboard. In its statement, the company said “We misrepresented the issue – one too complex for a billboard – and are taking it down.” It has also taken down the campaign on the accompanying website.
You may have heard that the director Whit Stillman, whose fourth movie, “Damsels in Distress,” opens Friday, is a chronicler of preppy culture. It’s not true. Stillman makes delightful movies, featuring light, witty scripts spoken by perfectly cast actors. But to consider Stillman an ethnographer of prep is to misunderstand both prep and Stillman movies.
It’s true that Stillman’s characters often wear stereotypically preppy clothing. They can be found in madras plaids, blue blazers, Lacoste shirts and other clothes historically associated with our country’s most selective colleges and the private schools that prepare — hence “prep” — students for them. They mention Brooks Brothers and Sag Harbor in casual conversation. But prepdom, as I understand it, and as I learned it in my own prep school and college, is only partly about clothing. It is more properly understood as an orientation toward power.
Preppies are most basically those people who don’t mind being associated with elite schools and the professions those schools feed into: banking, teaching, government (and one might add sailing instruction and magazine fact-checking). By virtue of the clothes they wear, they express their comfort being associated with a certain kind of cultural prerogative — one that is particularly suspect right now, in the era of foreclosures and Occupy Wall Street.
Stillman’s movies, from “Metropolitan” to “Damsels,” illustrate bigger ideas about the way preppiness is understood and misunderstood by Americans.
Like members of other subcultures, including Deadheads or Goths or English soccer hooligans, real preppies are at least willing to proclaim allegiances. Some of those allegiances are parochial, and might be represented by, say, a college scarf, while others are broader. But Stillman’s characters exist out of time and out of context. They may talk about politics (a bit), and may worry about how the lower classes perceive them, but they ultimately have almost nothing to say about, or even to do with, the institutions that form preppies: the universities, the banks, the government, even the yachting club. They’re all dressed up with no place to go.
Of course, thinking of Stillman as a preppy filmmaker is an understandable mistake. He is heavily responsible for his own inclusion in the pantheon of prep chroniclers, from J.D. Salinger to Louis Auchincloss, and Lisa Birnbach. His 1990 debut, “Metropolitan,” was the first movie to treat prep culture with a discerning eye after a decade that, despite the rise of Polo and other preppy brands, saw movie preps only as douffi (the plural of “doofus,” according to “Damsels in Distress”). I am thinking here of the Robert Prescott characters in “Real Genius” and “Bachelor Party,” or the golf-club villains in “Caddyshack.”
But “Metropolitan” was a shrewd movie about New York City private-school alumni on winter break from preppy colleges. It’s a movie whose plot hinges on a character’s decision to purchase at A.T. Harris the tuxedo he had been renting — after admitting to himself that if he’s to attend more debutante balls, he realizes he needs better threads — but that same character can have a thoughtful, if pretentious, discussion about Fourier. And Stillman, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, has the wit to give his characters names just a rep stripe away from caricature: “Tom Townsend,” “Serena Slocum,” “Rick von Sloneker.”
As if to further identify himself with prepdom, Stillman has always carried himself as a possible model for his characters. To this day, he meets reporters at the Harvard Club, and even when he is some miles away he still looks “like a wayward preppy trying to get into the Harvard Club” — a look, the New York Times Magazine recently noted, that involves “khakis, a white shirt and a blue blazer.” Stillman did, in fact, attend Harvard, which means that he could get into the Harvard Club, and if he had not attended Harvard he ought to have, being named John Whitney Stillman and all.
That willingness to dress a certain way — even when it might get you attacked by punks, as in “Last Days of Disco,” or called a fascist, as in 1994’s “Barcelona” — is a meaningful tenet of prepdom. But the clothes are not just an aesthetic choice. After all, it’s the rare preppy who does not know that she is wearing a uniform that, if not actually identical with an elite — anyone with a little money can buy the clothes — signals an aspiration toward elite society. To wear clothes made popular by the Ivy League is to announce an affirming attitude toward the Ivy League. That may not be a popular stance to take right now. For good reason, our country’s financial elite is under attack, and the schools that breed that elite deserve some of the opprobrium.
But preppy clothes have been the uniform of other products of the university, too, not just the bankers. Who loves a tweed jacket more than a humanities professor? And who loved a sack suit more than the elegant political radicals of the early 1960s? Take Malcolm X: For him, conservative attire was not ironic but proprietary. His clothes announced that he, and the Negro more generally, was entitled to the uniform and the prerogatives of power. Preppiness, in other words, is not inherently reactionary, and it is not inherently exclusionary; indeed, in a sense it is very democratic, precisely because one only needs the clothes, not a family crest. But it is not demotic; it is elitist. It is concerned with access to hierarchies, not the abolition of them. There have been left-wing preppies, but there have rarely been populist preppies.
In Stillman’s movies, however, preppiness almost never carries this complicated, interesting philosophical baggage. There are movies far less accomplished that nevertheless have more to say about the contradictions of prepdom. “School Ties” examines the anti-Semitism that used to pervade prep schools; “Igby Goes Down,” the nihilism and dysfunction of Manhattan private-school culture; “Dead Poets Society,” intellectual conformity; “Love Story,” the class chasm on Ivy League campuses. “The Rector of Justin,” the 1964 book by the dean of preppy novelists, Louis Auchincloss, depicts a rotten ethical core at the heart of a Groton-like boarding school. These works vary in quality, but they at least treat prepdom as the site of interesting, and often timely, dilemmas. They feature preppy clothes aplenty, for authenticity and because the clothes are beautiful to look at. But the clothes are just the superficial signifier of preppiness; the movies are about much more.
Stillman uses preppy clothes for an entirely different purpose.The clothes round out his characters, give the audience shorthand for what kind of families the characters come from, but above all take them out of time. For Stillman, preppy clothing is not a way to evoke, say, a Kennedy-era boarding school, but rather a way to defeat dating altogether. In short, if you wanted to make a fantasy movie set in some unidentifiable period of postwar America, you could use certain articles from Brooks Brothers and J. Press. And, indeed, that is what Stillman, who is not a realist or ethnographer but a fairy-tale fantasist, has done.
Consider “Metropolitan.” A screen card at the beginning says that it is set “not so long ago.” The characters seem to have late-20th-century diction — they don’t have the quasi-Brahmin speech patterns that persisted in the Ivy League into the 1960s (see the young John Kerry here) — but the yellow cabs are of an earlier vintage. The lapels on the men’s jackets are neither early-1960s narrow nor late-1970s wide. But the cut and the shoulders are not from the 1980s. Like the women’s gowns, the men’s dinner jackets are, in fact, designed to straddle all eras while beholden to none. It turns out that there are few styles harder to date accurately than the clothing appropriate for a debutante ball, or the preppy casual clothes one relaxes in afterward. The mystification of time continues in “The Last Days of Disco,” which according to the screen in the beginning occurs “in the very early 1980s,” but shows footage of the Disco Demolition Night held at Comiskey Park in July 1979.
In all Stillman’s movies, there is no racial or religious tension, no class envy, no religious bigotry. Stillman’s world even lacks many of the interlopers who have kept prep schools and elite colleges vital and meritocratic (and fashion-conscious): There are no obviously Jewish characters in Stillman’s movies, no Asian Americans, only one black character who so much as gets a name, and no gay men or lesbians.
There is nothing wrong with Stillman’s World, this alternate reality in which conversation is snappy, the young men and women are all attractive, and their clothes are tailored awfully well. There are times when I would not mind living there. But that’s because it’s a Utopia, literally a nowhere — it does not exist, it cannot exist. That the resident characters wear certain clothes we associate with certain schools, certain professions, certain vacation spots and certain stores does not mean that these characters are like the real-world people found in those schools, work professions, vacation spots or stores. Whit Stillman characters are not preppies; they just dress like them.
But more than ever, what is true of Stillman’s characters may be true of anyone wearing preppy clothing in America today: He is not exactly a preppy. It’s not that he lacks money or schooling — after all, the majority of preppies were always aspirational, rather than bred. It’s that the statement he is making has nothing to do with elite institutions or power. In fact, preppiness today is a way to avoid those conversations.
To wear such timeless clothing in 2012 is a bit like wearing very preppy clothing in 1970, when Whit Stillman was in college. Outside the haberdasher’s doors, there is warfare, recession and class anger; but on one’s back there are the clothes of another era, indeed clothes that transcend all eras. In a time of tumult, preppy clothing is escapist. It does not imply that its wearer is a conservative or a 1-percenter or opposes birth control for women. But it does suggest that, at least for the moment, he would rather talk about something else — as if it were a few years ago, or a few years from now. As if talking about something else were ever really possible.
This article originally appeared on
Imprint.
Recently in Holland there appeared a series of ads designed by Doom&Dickson for a HEMA’s push-up bra, using this tag line:
A push-up bra that gives you 2 cup sizes extra. Modeled by Andrej Pejic. A man. So imagine what it can do for a woman.
Andrej Pejic, a male model from Bosnia, is from my neck of the woods and is also known as “the prettiest boy in the world.” In the fashion industry, where a small percentage of female models succeed, Andrej is widely accepted as one of the top supermodels by fashion and mainstream media (See covers below).
When you find out he is a man, does he become less beautiful? If so, does that challenge your thinking about beauty?
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.
Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.
If you thought the End of Days was going to resemble a Chevy ad, you must not have been near a Target on Sunday. September’s Missonigeddon might have been intense, but it turned out to be small taters compared to the Jason Wupocalypse. This is how civilization ends. Not with a nuclear missile strike but with a run on kitty cat-festooned tote bags.
Jason Wu is the young, impeccably elegant designer whose career went into the stratosphere when high-profile Michelle Obama chose his dreamy, one-shouldered creation for her husband’s inaugural ball in 2009. His preppy-with-an-edge ready-to-wear designs retail at high-end stores like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom for upward of a thousand bucks a pop. So from the moment Target – which has in the past done wildly successful collaborations with the likes of Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier and Rodarte — announced that it was teaming up with Wu for a February launch, the slavering began. And when Target released a preview teaser of zippy little navy and cream ensembles, we all pretty much knew: There would be blood.
Sure enough, there was. Across the land, you could hear the cries of disappointment as the entire collection was snapped up before most of America had brewed its Sunday morning coffee. In some quarters, it got downright ugly. In Miami, a couple cleaned out the entire line “in two minutes.” Store security was called to intervene, the mob turned angry, and one of the Wu vultures allegedly taunted the other shoppers by saying they could “buy it off him outside.”
I’m a fan of Wu’s cool, ladylike and eminently wearable designs, and, as it happens, live near a Target. And because I usually swing by the superstore after my Sunday morning run anyway, I figured this weekend would afford an opportunity to at least check out the Wu wares. I assumed it wouldn’t be crazy there, because believe me when I say that the Bronx Target, conveniently located near the Applebee’s and that guy selling incense on a card table, is not exactly the fashionista Mecca of Miami.
It was not yet 10 in the morning on the line’s launch day when I entered the store. What I found was a scene of devastation unlike anything I’d since, oh, Filene’s Going Out of Business sale in December. The entire accessory line of cute purses and scarves was nowhere to be found. And the handful of racks that had held the promise of cap-sleeved blouses and pleated skirts was picked as clean as a cow carcass in piranha-infested waters. The real pros had likely cleared off moments after the store opened at 8. But around the racks, there still hovered a group of what appeared to be three teams of shoppers, who, by the random assortment of wares in their carts, were not there to beef up their own wardrobes. What was left? One XL trench coat. One XL gold peplum top. One L short-sleeved tee. Over in the children’s department, I noticed that someone had squirreled away a cream-colored shirt in a medium. I felt a momentary impulse to snatch it up like a gold nugget in a stream before remembering that it wasn’t really my style.
It was a scene being replayed in Targets all over the country, where the line swiftly disappeared — only to reappear soon after on eBay. There are currently well over 11,000 Jason Wu for Target items up for auction – most promising “NWT” (new with tags) — and selling at considerable markup. A $39 poplin dress is going for $180. A purse that was $49 is selling for $280. Free enterprise in action.
Designer collaborations with low-priced chain stores – and the frenzies that accompany them — are nothing new, as those of us who still wake up screaming from the flashbacks of the Lagerfeld for H&M stampede back in 2004 will attest. And they will no doubt continue — though Target imposed limits on how many items customers could order online, it set no such restrictions on what went down in the stores. Company spokesman Joshua Thomas told the Wall Street Journal this week “the company was ‘disappointed’ there was so much hoarding.” EBay put it in more calculating terms, noting that “this week the marketplace … reflected the public’s enthusiasm.
It may be “disappointing” that a handful of eBay-savvy pros can change how an entire line of clothing is distributed to the masses. But just because a designer goes down-market at the same place you buy your economy-size bags of cat litter, it doesn’t make the world of fashion any more inherently fair or democratic. If it were, designers wouldn’t be creating clothes with size 0 teenagers in mind. It’s just how it is. And so I left Target Sunday morning with dishwashing liquid but no new dresses. I didn’t mind. I’ve got my sights on spring’s new Marni for H&M line anyway.
Greta Gerwig and Adam Brody in "Damsels in Distress" 
