Polishing The Brass On The Bergdorf's

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Scatter My Ashes At Bergdorf's, the new documentary about you guessed it Bergdorf Goodman's big fancy-ass store on Fifth Avenue here in New York City and its hundred plus years in business, kind of feels like one of those videos that play on repeat in your hotel room telling you about all of the hotel's many striking amenities. Bask in the glory of the shoe salon! Ooh, ahh! Behold the wonder of the draperies in the spacious upstairs apartment! Ahh, ooh! Justify repugnant craven consumption as if you're doing the poors a favor when you buy those sixty thousand dollar Manolos! Yes, yes, yes!

It is, and I totally use this phrase lightly, a grotesquerie of excess, drowning in mountains of Swarovski baubles and choking on its own over-perfumed stench. And it and everybody in it are so entirely proud of that fact there's really no point in pointing it out. So we do what we do, we pretend otherwise, we lap up the nonsense because gosh they're colorful big personalities, destroying the world one ever so pretty ream of prized anaconda skin at a time. These things are important, super important, because money money money! Bah humbug, I know, I just found it all so gross. Just pinch your nose and punch yourself in the crotch and recite Meryl's cerulean speech and you'll get the gist.

There are a few moments of (unintentional) insight scattered about - the Halston muse who's fixated on John F. Kennedy's exploded head without quite being able to say the phrase "exploded head" is typical, in that regard; I don't think there's a more apt metaphor for this crowd than a pink pill-box hat dripping with gore. And the personal shopper whose name I am so happy I don't remember because my god I have more important things to keep on file inside my brain, that old lady the film momentarily focuses on, she's one of those big colorful personalities I mentioned derisively but she's got a nice cut-through-the-bullshit demeanor that keeps her on the right side of entertaining inside a vacuum of vapidity, a la somebody like Bill Cunningham. And I do love the windows. But the day I go looking for my insights from the Olsen Twins is the day I carve off my own skin for a pair of extravagant heels.

I have to say the crowd of hip somebodies and their hangers-on that I was seeing the film with (it was the premiere so the fashion luminaries were there in full so-very-hungry force) were much better behaved than I anticipated - I suppose they were so hypnotized by having their egos so thoroughly stroked they were actually able to put down their phones for two hours (yes this thing is two hours long, somehow). Maybe I was just high off the fumes of Kathy and Richard Hilton and their orange daughter Nicky, who were sitting two rows in front of me, or perhaps it was the smell of the burning Hilfiger clan from down the row; maybe whatever gelatinous beast from outer space that it takes to keep Cristian Siriano's hair in place was the culprit? There must be somebody to blame for my impressive ill will, anyway. There were about fifty women who could have been Barbara Eden as she looks now - do you think plastic surgeons just have a machine with a "Barbara Eden" setting that they have do all their work for them on these rich ladies while they take off to play golf? I think they must.

But berating these people is beside the point (even if I did just spend a ton of words on doing just that) - there are plenty of fashion documentaries that've made me overlook the gleeful vulgarity of fashion culture, ones that've focused on actual craftspeople, people with real skills who actually make beautiful things. This is a two hour hand-job for a store. It rambles around looking for a point, but really it all comes down to is Yoko Ono spending half a million dollars on furs on Christmas Eve - they kill because they can, and because it momentarily masks the emptiness, and because they're too fucking fabulous to live.
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