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We can’t believe that we made it this far into the day without discovering this breathtaking new development: The Observer ran an article about…socialites! And how some of them are not like the others. It’s completely out of character for the paper. The Observer’s prep-master general, David Foxley, today dissects the phenomenon of the “fauxcialite,” the society girls who can’t be bothered to get all dressed up every time a tot needs a new toy. Surprisingly (and we mean that honestly, not in the obnoxious, overly sarcastic way we wrote the lead-in to this item), it’s not filled with the classic Observer tone, where a reporter pretends to take a subject seriously, and then lets himself hoist himself with his own petard. (“The doorman eyed Mr. Cheban’s Louis Vuitton shoes appreciatively. ‘Some day I’ll get there,’ the man sighed longingly. ‘I’m not quite there yet, but some day.’ ‘Don’t worry — it took me awhile to get them, too!’ Mr. Cheban said. ‘Actually, it totally didn’t,’ he confessed minutes later. ‘I just didn’t want to make him feel bad.’”) But the story does include lots and lots of moments of genius from our favorite socialite ever, Tinsley Mortimer Ally Hilfiger! Gosh bless her.
• “I think it’s pretty narcissistic of these socialite girls to worry so much about how they’re going to look when their intentions should just be about giving back,” Ms. Hilfiger said of her more high-maintenance sistren, sliding her naked heels forward on an ebony neoclassical coffee table. “I can’t imagine having a blow dryer or a curling iron in my hair more than, like, twice a month!”
• Ms. Hilfiger admitted she likes getting dolled up for black-tie parties—“I am a girl!”—but insisted she prefers spending a night out with a small coterie of friends, under the radar, at some place like GoldBar.
• “You have to prove yourself to the world,” she said. “It’s like, this [capsule collection Hilfiger is designing for artist Izzy Gold] better be fuckin’ perfect. It’s my name on the line, and I’ve gotta prove to other people that I can do it and that I’m serious about it.”
• Asked how she would respond if someone were to accuse her of having an easy life, Ms. Hilfiger sat erect, narrowed her gaze and said: “If they did, I would just be like, ‘Come with me for a day and see if you could do it!’”
• “I just feel that I’m a very driven, motivated person,” Ms. Hilfiger said of her work ethic, pausing to gaze in the direction of a spotlight mounted near a wall of windows. “If I’m stagnant for a certain amount of time, I tend to not feel happy. I don’t feel like myself. There’s so much creative energy in me.”
The Fauxcialites [NYO]
