So. What is this? Humblebrag-the-article? ("With pale skin, red hair, gangly arms, and clumsy legs, I’ve been told I look like either a manga character or a high school senior. There is no mature beauty about me. [She is 30 and has a baby.] Rather than mourn that fact, I dress to embrace it.") Trolling? ("What grown woman wants to risk looking childish in an expensive designer dress? That would be me.") Something in between? ("[L]ike my mother before me, who got carded well into her thirties, I’m often mistaken for a student.")
Or is it some sort of personality issue on display (or - it's writing! - that of the author's narrative persona)? ("Undeniably, there’s a small thrill, a tiny power in rejecting other women’s standards, in playing the provocateur. And in knowing firsthand the one sure way to win the attention of every man and piss off every woman in any given room: Wear thigh-high socks.")
Or is just obliviousness? ("Kate [Moss] herself was a revelation, a one-woman shift in the beauty paradigm who made it seem possible that there was an upside to being built like I was.") It might be super-highbrow thinspiration, which is, if nothing else, not something one sees every day. Not a genre one sees much of, which is probably for the best.
Whatever it is, it's strangely compelling. Well done, Stephanie La Cava. I may be a year older and an unthinkable number of pounds heavier than you are, I may identify with exactly none of that article, but it was, I suppose, food for thought.
Speaking of food, see also her Grub Street Diet. Although it, too, should probably come with a trigger warning of some kind.
"T-shirts with extralong sleeves to pull over my hands and hide my thumbs"
ReplyDeleteIs there a reason to do this other than being borderline?
But yeah, she seems extremely annoying. The crucial thing about Lolita is her age--not her wardrobe.
See, this is exactly the sort of person what I think of when I think of New York rich people.
ReplyDeleteAssuming narrator=author, she seems to suffer from the not-uncommon and not-all-that-tragic (and by no means rich-NYer-specific) condition of not seeing herself as the world sees her. *She* thinks she looks like an adorable 12-year-old, not an emaciated 30-year-old. Now, there's no shame in looking like an emaciated 30-year-old (or, ahem, like a 31-year-old of unremarkable proportions), and everyone's adorable to someone, but it's its own thing.
ReplyDeleteAnd there's nothing wrong with dressing for an age you are not, but there's self-delusion involved in thinking that you've successfully tricked others into believing that's your age.
I guess if her wealth/place in the world have entered into things at all, it could be that no one in her life dares tell it like it is. That there's just so much ambient flattery in her world that reality's harder to access.
Well, and the fact that people seem to pay her to write about the kind of socks she wears and where she prefers to buy chicken is only going to fuel the narcissism.
ReplyDelete