Wednesday, December 03, 2008 - Posts
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Sean Avery, hockey's self-confessed bad boy, was suspended indefinitely yesterday by the NHL for making remarks to a reporter about "how it's become a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds." The vaguely gross remark was aimed at exes Elisha Cuthbert and Rachel Hunter, both of whom are now dating other pro hockey players. It was also a deliberate stunt by Avery, who walked up to a group of reporters during a morning skate and asked them if there was a camera present before delivering his comments.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I don't really see what's all that terrible about the term "sloppy seconds." Juvenile, yes—but making disparaging remarks about the wives and girlfriends of your opponents is habitual within professional sports. In the 1998 FIFA World Cup, David Beckham was given a red card for kicking Diego Simeone, who had reportedly made graphic and insulting comments about his wife, Victoria, aka Posh Spice. More recently in the 2006 World Cup final, Zinedine Zidane was sent off for head-butting an Italian opponent who had called his sister a whore. Sean Avery's always been an expert at aggravating his opponents. Unfortunately, this time it was the last straw for the NHL.
Avery, who is frequently targeted by his teammates for his love of high fashion, was one of my fellow interns at Vogue this summer. I never actually met him, as he was rarely in the office past his first two weeks, choosing instead to do decidedly more uninterny things like attending fashion shows in Paris and guest-editing Men's Vogue online (their Web traffic skyrocketed). So I really have no idea if he's as much of a pig in real life as he seems to be on the ice. However, everyone at Vogue loved him, particularly the older editors, and he was very good about giving out signed autographs and pictures for friends and family. The Sean Avery Fashion Story is reportedly set to become a movie, so regardless of his character he's an excellent self-publicist.
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Women's Wear Daily has commissioned fashion designers from Betsey Johnson to Peter Som to imagine outfits Michelle Obama might wear to the inauguration. The resulting slide show, published on Monday, is full of sumptuous looks: I favor the clean lines of Isaac Mizrahi's sorbet-colored gown and the sparkly white kimono envisaged by Diane Von Furstenberg. (Monique Lhuillier should keep her superfluous ruffles on the red carpet, if you ask me.) But paging through the entries, I was struck by how incapable the world's top fashion designers are of sketching Michelle. The fashion world is notoriously inhospitable to black women—if Michelle Obama lands the cover of Vogue, as has been rumored, she’ll be one of the few black nonmodels ever to grace it—but these sketches suggest a discomfort with blackness that’s truly startling. Check out Karl Lagerfeld's “Mrs. Obama”: Leaning heavily on the peach cray-pas, he produces a woman who looks more like Jackie Kennedy than Michelle. Badgley Mischka’s Michelle is a buff-colored, collagen-lipped blank; Michael Kors goes for bronze; Marc Jacobs and Koi Suwannagate both produce sketches with recognizably Michelle-shaped hair but skin that registers somewhere between alabaster and geisha. Of course, fashion sketches are stylized, not representational, which gives these designers plenty of wiggle room. (This may or may not explain why Zac Posen’s Michelle looks like a dying guppy.) But still: Is it so hard to draw a woman with black skin?
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To Hanna's question about whether any of us feel we could pull off a "fake romance," a la those high-end prostitutes who "date for months before pairing up'' and stroke more egos than anything else: Most women are pretty good actors, I think, having been trained from the beginning to smile and make people feel good. But what I wonder is how fake these romances for hire really are; if that Pennsylvania college student is so gaga for her sugar daddy, how is that different from what the Real Housewives of wherever feel for their rich hubbies?
When I was single, in another century, I finally eased up on judging women who seemed to be chasing dollar signs when I realized that it wasn't so much that they were making some kind of moral compromise or settling for security as that they just found money sexy, the same way I found it a turnoff. No kidding, wealth was a mark against a guy in my book, which was filled with social workers, dollar-a-word writers, and men struggling with possible religious vocations. Not because I'd taken a vow of poverty or was making a stand on principle, but because that just was my taste, same as that college girl Meghan wrote about goes for Louboutins and the "poshest'' hotel in Atlantic City.
Either this "be your own pimp" option further blurs the definition of prostitution or it brings clarity to the trading of sex/youth/looks for money/power/security. But that's a trade that sure is taken for granted in our culture—or so it seems on all these "win a rich bachelor" reality shows. And though it's our own bargains we should worry about, it's hard not to look at the people on both ends of those deals and think: Wow, you get what you pay for (and pay for what you get.)
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