People, Places and Coco

One of my seamstresses printed off a link for me today, which I thought was rather interesting. When I say "interesting" I mean in the way that the old man at the opera who tries to chat up the younger lady behind him with stories of how he lost his tooth-and-needed-to-get-a-false-one is "interesting" (for the record, that old man was rather unsuccessful in his attempts to chat up the girl. I know, because last night I went to the opera with Alber and we saw That Old Man with our very own eyes. We also saw a naked Tom Ford, but that's another story- he doesn't wear clothes much these days, which I tell him is fine- unless he's ugly or fat. Tom is neither- he's too processed and chemicalized and all those other "izes" to actually be ugly. Anyway).
So this link can be found here. It's some young lady "mouthing off" (see? I have the young people phrases "down") about certain bloggers, among them my daughter, her mother, and some woman called luxirare- which is really no name for a person, really. Maybe if this "luxirare" changed her name, she wouldn't be called pretentious as much, hm? "Pretentious" is one of the words that this young lady-blogger calls this luxirare: "She is too pretentious, her grammar is poor, and she features aggressive photos of singularly nauseating food. It doesn’t help that she mentions her mom’s old Chanel stuff. If your mom owned lots of Chanel, she should have taught you some manners, like don’t boast about your privileged background."
So I had another assistant print out the entirety of luxirare's blog. I sometimes work in fashion, and there's a lot of pretentious people there- so I know it when I see it. I don't particularly think she is very chic, or a very good writer, or even a particularly good photographer (J.A, I'm rather confident that I know what you're thinking right now.)
But! This girl is not pretentious. She's too bourgeois. She eats food. What sort of person eats food? She is obviously not fashion enough. She likes high shoulders- high shoulders are bourgeois. It's the same as liking "Britain's got Talent" or somesuch. It's not pretentious, it's just mind numbingly bourgeois, no? As for her mother owning Chanel- well, Coco had barely any manners herself. I imagine she's probably got it off with Confucius or that young chap with the beard by now. Not that I'm judging. Of course, she had manners around the handsome men, hm? That's where it counts. That and the grandparents.

You know, I made some comments as Coco herself the other day to some magazine. Harpers or something. I said Coco wasn't a feminist, and if anyone's bothered to read a book (or shall I tweet it?), they'd find that Coco said this herself. Anyway- a Certain Person sent me this link the other day.
Let us analyze this post, as Nabokov might not have done because he's dead. First of all, the person who wrote the post is called "Mary Ann" and I have a certain liking for people whose first names end with "Ann", or "Anne" in particularly. Already I don't mind the writer of this post! And now let us get out our map of France, which you can find here. We start our journey in Crete, which is close enough to France anyway. Trace the route from Crete to Paris, whilst remembering, of course, that this is 1840 so you are not flying in a plane!

That actually had nothing to do with anything, I just felt like doing that. If you imagined you were Napoleon you get bonus points and are one step closer to enlightenment. Congratulations.

In this post Mary Ann says my brief stint imitating Coco "carries deeply problematic repercussions". Well, Mary Ann. I'm flattered you feel this way- I really do. I'm deeply flattered, because you assume that a man pretending to be Coco Chanel for a magazine that has Leighton Meester on the cover is something of influence to some unstated group of people. To whom? To people in doctor's waiting rooms? Of course, that isn't to say that I'm not concerned about the effect I have on people in doctor's waiting rooms, but since they're waiting for a doctor anyway I'm sure they have bigger problems to worry about. (But what about the children-who-aren't-actually-sick accompanying their parents to the doctor's waiting room? I'd wonder what they're doing reading a fashion magazine in the first place. Isn't that a tad worrying? We'll have a generation of young girls who grew up reading US Vogue and can jump midair and freeze their pose next.

Next, Mary Ann, who I still have a whippet of affection for, writes "..through his repeated use of the definite ’never’, Karl negates and silences an inspiring interpretation of Coco’s work and perpetuates a damaging stereotype that is almost as tired, boring and ‘ugly’ as he."
Non, non, non. I'm not silencing any interpretation of Coco's work. People are free to think what they like! Just because I said something in a magazine doesn't stop people thinking something. Good Coco, this isn't 1984 or somesuch. As for being "tired", I am never tired. I don't sleep. You all know this of course, dear readers. I'd hardly think I'm "boring" as well- why, I bathe in the blood of models whilst still wearing my suit as an still-alive-alligator carries my luggage from the car up to my live-in closet. Gosh. I'm merely saying what Coco would've said herself- she was a woman of her time. A liberator, but a woman of her time. If the magazine asked, say: "did you liberate woman" I could've replied "Yes, and I got them more boyfriends too." Yet the magazine asked whether Coco considered herself a feminist, and frankly, she didn't. I would've been lying to say otherwise, hm?