Watching celebrities attempt to dress in character with regards to the loose theme of an international event is a bit like watching what Lindsay Lohan wears to court.
You know both are going to be hideously offensive to the significance of the occasion that it makes you question whether you should drop your 9-5 gig and become a stylist, because an apparent inability of the collective profession to use Google makes the workload of the fashion editors at US Weekly seem as taxing as giving yourself a congratulatory high five.
In the case of Lohan, her stylist’s prison break M.O. is basically channeling Jackie Kennedy on a raging bout of PMS, strutting home amid a leisurely morning-after walk of shame, usually involving an awkward plunging neckline and a good serving of structured panels of sheer black lace. (For the cash-strapped reality teen mom in trouble with the family court, the look is more, ‘whatever black ensemble costs more than the equivalent at Ann Taylor.’) The word is out on what inappropriate threads LiLo will don while playing the role of caring volunteer teacher while completing her court-mandated community service at the Duffield Children’s Center in Brooklyn…
In the case of our stars flexing their toes in the sand at the Cannes Film Festival while off the red carpet, the emerging theme in dress code is ‘something that makes me look smarter, a bit scruffier and a tad poorer than my last spread in Vogue.’
(And then there’s Miranda Kerr, who rocked up to the annual film event for no apparent plausible reason other than she used to date an actor, strutting the red carpet at a Magnum ice cream party almost naked in a plunging saccharine pink thigh-split Emanuel Ungaro gown, a look so needlessly precarious that it prompted talk she was auditioning for a starring role alongside a bedfellow financier and his yacht that evening.
Would-be applicants had a tizzy when the recruitment process almost unraveled before their Gucci-clad eyes, the former Victoria’s Secret babe almost becoming the empress with no clothes after a security guard stepped on the flowing gown, nearly completely undressing the supermodel. The megawatt smile aside, I’m sure lending her star quality to such floaters as a supermarket ice cream brand and podiatry-friendly Reeboks can’t have been what Kerr wanted from her post-catwalk career.)
In an emerging thematic seemingly as unlikely as Robin Thicke’s father gyrating to his philandering son’s Blurred Lines to ‘get in the mood’, this year, the celebrity A-listers at Cannes have, so far, given a futuristic nod to outer space and all its zero fashion-inspiring glory, ahead of the release of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, later this year.
Now it’s no surprise that Hollywood is jumping on the F train in an attempt to capitalize on both the geeky tech boom and their delayed discovery that you can actually purchase goods online. ‘Have you heard of Amazon? It’s genius!’ one star was overheard namedropping, while sipping a calorie-free vodka drink on the deck of an Armenian billionaire’s boat.
But, upon joining the rest of civilization in discovering e-commerce, replacing your stylist with your latest recruit – a 23-year old tech wizard that’s never been kissed and has an unhealthy obsession with Princess Leia – is not going to win you any sartorial ‘add to bag’s on the red carpet.
In the same way that celebrities have turned late night TV on its head by reversing the interview process to make way for a forum in which they can flex that other skill besides acting that they never cared about, the ladies of the silver screen are using e-commerce to shine a little light on their roots, while making a tidy amount of much-needed coin on the side by repurposing generic goods with their label engrained.
Following in the well-heeled footsteps of Princess Blake Lively and Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop, Reese Witherspoon is the latest to launch an e-commerce site devoted to lifestyle content, inspired by her deep-seeded love of the South, ‘combined with the modern woman I am today.’
The site, which is as pretty, girly and as Southern as a Legally Blonde walking tour on the steps of the main hall of the University of Tennessee, complete with complementary ten-foot high servings of cotton candy, runs with the tagline, “You only get one life, so let’s make it pretty. Please.” Upon reading this, any self-esteem deprived 19 year old college student is sure to think, screw study, I’m gonna go get myself a Mani-Pedi and a dozen new outfits. What? A free credit card at Ann Taylor Loft?! Sign me up! Make me pretty!
Having a guidebook about how to live a more refined or filtered life by someone who drunkenly slurred to Cara Delevingne at last year’s MET ball, “You know what’s the most important thing in a name for a girl? Is that a man can whisper it into his pillow” is about as palatable as being forced to witness a Mel Gibson antiemetic drunken meltdown while waiting in line for 45 minutes to purchase a Malm bedframe at the Ikea location he decided to come to, half cut, for nothing but a hotdog.
It would be one thing if these celebs were imparting life advice clocked up over the decades carving a name for themselves in show biz, but it’s an entirely different kettle of cancerous fish when you’re told the best way to live better is by purchasing one of Reese’s $98 ‘horseshoe object’s, presumably blessed with her priceless, Good Luck tears.
Or there’s the super cute and fun, ‘Totes Y’all Vanderbilt’ bag, which goes for the ripe sum of $155, otherwise known as a discount canvas tote snapped-up from flailing retailer American Apparel, reimagined with a Southern vibe by listing a university in the region and penning a Southern phrase on the front with a pencil from your newly purchased, $14 ‘Southern Pencil Set’.
As with most of the celebrity-fronted shopping sites, Witherspoon, hungover and foggy from a big night out during this year’s awards season, perused unemployed CEOs as part of the recruitment process ahead of her Draper James-named product launch.
After much deliberation, she poached hired C. Wonder’s former president, Andrea Hyde, to fill the position, relieving Hyde of her duties clipping tickets on the floor of the brand’s 5th Ave. store, jostling for a piece of real estate among the hordes of angry shoppers vying for a pair of $10 flats amid the liquidation process of the broke retailer.
But, like Goop’s friendly advice on how to liquidate your bowels, Draper James also educates about how to entertain like Southerners do through her ‘I Love a Luncheon’ feature, which would be useful if it was true to the liquid lunch that the foodphobic Hollywood kids actually enjoy. But instead, Witherspoon offers up a dithery spate of information better suited to those times you get together with your girlfriends to ‘dress up, eat, drink, and of course laugh’. Because laughing is what you will be doing as you wipe your sweaty brow on an $85 monogrammed linen napkin in as you scoff down a piece of fried chicken in the 130 degree lovely mosquito-laden Deep South heat. .
Exactly how lifestyle sites can serve as a vehicle igniting an ability to ‘live better’ by any other way than through the purchase of a piece of adult tableware you might otherwise not have been inspired to purchase, is as bizarre as the expected success of Verona – a new Tinder-style app for facilitating Israelis and Palestinians to date. Because not having the right app or celebrity lifestyle site is the big problem…
“Pretty please. It’s not just a way to get what you want,” begins Witherspoon, while perched on a floral potpourri-scented couch on a video explaining her site’s origins, which promptly rejiggers your memory back to that time when her sweet, pretty requests when arguing with an Atlanta cop fell on deaf ears, following which she implied that her celebrity status would bring him all shades of problems after pulling over husband Jim Toth for drunk driving.
Hrmm, you think, after recalling that Tennessee is one of the last states to allow open containers of alcohol in moving cars, prompting lawmakers to propose a ‘Pass the Bottle’ bill to prevent the driver doing just that to another passenger when pulled over by the police for drunk driving.
“It’s a lifestyle,” she continues, defending all things of the South, following which you mull over the aforementioned incident, internally pardoning the blonde starlet for her prior cute, pretty behavior mid- arrest. Maybe you too can use her lifestyle bible to stage your own, pretty DUI.
“In the South, you can never be too kind, too gracious or too well dressed,” she rasps, in her soft, Southern drawl, which, having since infiltrated your brain, induces you to steal your mother’s most expensive party frock, down a bottle of Jack Daniels, grab the keys to your Ford Civic and zigzag your way to your Witherspoon-inspired liquid luncheon.
And when you promptly get pulled over, what does Witherspoon suggest you respond in your defense? Draper James made me do it? Or Jack Daniels? ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she consoles you, as you weep into the phone from your cold prison cell. ‘They’re interchangeable. They’re both capable of getting a pretty female, or a handsome man, whatever they want! You just have to ask for it!’
Following your brief chat, Witherspoon has her assistant call the head of marketing at Budweiser, armed with a fresh set of partnership ideas to ‘Pretty-ize’ their ‘Never Say No’ campaign. Because there was nothing legal or blonde-friendly about that.
