The first thing we saw walking into Preen this afternoon was Elle’s Anne Slowey winking at Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, who is looking more like her mother than ever, and who was decked out in a variety of pelts and leathers. What was that about, we wondered? Was Julia planning to follow in her mother’s footsteps and get her name on a masthead? Are they one another’s freshly acquired Facebook friend? Are they having a secret affair? (It’s clearly the latter: Even if it’s not, let’s just see if we can get some traction on that rumor.) We have to know.
The second thing we saw was Olivia Palermo’s legs, encased in leather leggings and approximately the size of our arms. One of the great questions of the world is, how does a girl that tiny manage to maintain such a healthy-looking head of hair? Whatever her secret is, she should bottle it and sell it on QVC.
But the most intriguing thing we saw at Preen was the woman seated directly across from Olivia, who bore a tremendously striking resemblance to Ugly Betty’s Becki Newton, whom we’d last seen at the Preen show in September. But that Becki Newton had been made up within an inch of her adorable life, and this one was bare-faced. In fact, had we not been sitting across from her, we might never have noticed her — the photogs certainly didn’t. And yet, we’d bet all the Diet Coke in our minibar right now that it was, in fact, the tiny actress, gone very incognito and casual. Becki — and let’s just assume we’re right about this, even if we are the same people who once thought we saw Gwyneth Paltrow only to discover we were looking at a dude — was having the time of her life: taking copious photos, bopping in her seat to the music, and chatting up her seatmate. Frankly, even if this is a case of mistaken identity, we salute anyone who is capable of having that good a time without even putting any lip gloss on first.
