How To Spend It

For its sheer fuck-off-flaunti-ness, I secretly admire the Financial Times on Saturday’s glossy supplement, How To Spend It. I only get to see it because I occasionally like to check up on the price of the gas shares Sid sold me and to establish whether buying those get-rich-quick penny shares circa Bananarama was bananas. Currently quoted at 4.5p per share, there's still scant prospect of that infinity pool and villa in the Var, sadly. For those who have better use for the FT’s £2.80 cover price, it goes like this. Worst economic crisis since the Depression, be damned! How to spend it now, apparently, is like a modern Marie Antoinette on terrific teal Dior slip dresses, a snip at £11,450 (£950 heels included) - roughly the same as the annual wage for many nurses. And so the call to conspicuous consumption goes on:’tanzanite’ (me neither) earrings, £22,600; ‘racing machine‘ wristwatches that cost more than some houses; ‘spa junkie’ fixes in ’billionaires’ playground’ Cap-Ferrat; a Duesenberg coupe set to fetch $4.5 plus million at auction. No mention of the cost of a tube of cream to apply to noses grazed from being rubbed in it. This, at a time when some are figuring how not to spend it - e.g. smashing Comet’s windows and grabbing a £10.99 kettle or something equally sad.  ‘Let them eat (Fortnum’s) cake’ and dream, eh?

The Fashionably Principled

Fashionistas with principles make me queasy: these two-faced PC airheads wear Hamnett-style Save The Planet Ts yet happily drive flash gas guzzlers paid for by the boyf's bonus. He works in one of those ghastly banks, the very institutions they were railing against until a chance encounter at Whisky Mist, a shag in his Mayfair townhouse's Frette sheets (no child workers exploited in the manufacture thereof, obviously) and a weekend on his 40 metre Sunseeker yacht off Juan-les-Pins kicked that particular fashionable cause right into the long grass. Skin deep, they support a supermodel’s publicity-grab anti-fur pronouncements, only to skin up, happily wrapping dead animal round their silly, slender necks, the minute the grubby cow does a volte face, paid megabucks to strut mink in Milan.  According to Instantluxe, a website where label Mabels trade second-hand designer gear, stylistas are again adopting the moral high ground, dumping Dior BIG time ahead of Galliano’s trial for alleged anti-Semitism. 'John who? Sorry, did I used to know you?' Shouldn’t they also ditch their coveted vintage Chanel pieces? After all, wasn’t Coco loco for a man in (the wrong) uniform? Burn the Westwood punk top (swastikas just won’t do, whatever the Dame’s intended message was); cull les Le Courbusier chairs - the jury’s out on his wartime leanings - and see if eBay still accepts Lars von Trier DVDs. What about the Wagner CD?  As they probably mean the bloke off X Factor, not Adolf’s favourite, that can stay.