Your Leather Vagina Looks Like Trash

I sound crazy? YOU traded a vacation for a garbage-looking carpetbag, bud.

OK, I don’t give a damn how normal the “designer goods are worth what I pay for them” delusion seems to you, or how Meryl Streep’s speech in the Devil Wears Prada took reasonable poor people down a peg or two, ha ha, or how only haters don’t see the fun in paying 700 euros for a pair of sneakers crookedly glued together by a toddler trapped on an artificial island because they have the letter G on them. Bottom line, this is my final offer:

I cannot guess what you people are thinking when you spend two grand on a used, scuffed purse that looks like a flowered, foreshortened constipation turd with caramel corn.

Does it double as a vibrator? A bodybag? Colostomy? Anything that wouldn’t make me question my own judgment forever after deciding a poop Triscuit covered in another person’s monogram was worth the price of a week in a resort hotel?

Actually that’s not even close to the ugliest overpriced leather vagina I’ve seen recently. Chicago was reasonable with a sprinkle of Coach; but LA was full of them, Paris is full of them, and they all make me sad.

Yeah, there are more expensive cars, but there are also cheaper houses. Does that lock even do anything?

They’re proud, dumpy eyesores in an increasingly ugly city, usually strapped to tourists who are wearing all the other fall-of-Rome-level-except-ugly decadence they bought this morning simultaneously, only to be pickpocketed, get blisters from the poorly-finished heel, and spill soup on their Chanel bag that turns out to be croûte de cuir, and probably break a zipper too, enabling them to go ahead and pronounce the vacation ruined well before dinner.

Part of the sadness is: If they hadn’t bought that embarrassing bag, they could have easily funded a new vacation.

Which might make more sense if the infamous Birkin bag, or ANY of these goddamn bags, were a timeless piece of wearable art. Some of the same companies that make these fucking sacks have indeed made such objects. But are you trying to tell me that the people who designed the following abortions were not making fun of us?:

Congratulations on the sliver of self-consciousness involved in forcing your spouse to politely and humorously chide you about your financial insanity for content. “They’re an investment!” OK, maybe she’s not that self-aware. Hope the views on this video made a dent in their credit-card bills.

What conceivable outfit do you suppose that tutti-frutti Vuitton is meant to go with? Let me guess: They have a matching tracksuit and sneakers, so you can shed fifteen ugly, unnecessary grand to secure your “30-year-old high-school dropout who smokes rollies at the off-track betting all day, but better than you” coord, eh?

And why is Chanel manufacturing weapons?

As I said when someone in this hellhole called Margot Robbie “mid”: Why are you people trying to convince me I’m going blind?

Don’t get me wrong—if I have to wear clothes, then thank god for resale; better to submit to the used designer clothes than pay the same 40 clams for some crookedly-sewn itchy polyester blend that is copying designer clothes at chez Target.

It’s not like there’s any way to escape the corporate/boring deee-mons while you’re buying new retail; the Devil in Prada had something of a point there. You may only decide how cheap and crappy you want your still-insultingly-overpriced store to be, and which kind of snubbing you prefer: From staff who don’t think you’re good enough for the store, or from staff who think the store isn’t good enough for them.

I’d rather wash the dead skin cells off some old Chloé that came in the mail, thanks. It’s better than washing off formaldehyde. (What does one choose, in a world of no non-gross choices?)

But I still don’t get what was going through the original owners’ minds.

Why is it worth such a chunk of your other dreams to own a square of what might be vinyl?

I know it’s supposed to be a status symbol, but it isn’t, really; most of us don’t know what the hell those letters mean, and the rest will see you as a snob, a sucker, or their next crime victim. Maybe one person will be like, cool, I want that purse, and now maybe they hate you a little.

Four grand, though. Five grand. Those Hermès bags aren’t actively ugly, but wouldn’t you rather have a tiny house?

Do people not imagine all the other stuff they could do with all that money? The hobby equipment. The dozens of day trips. The camping, the glamping, the celebrity tours; learn to code, learn to dance, boxing, helicopter rides in the desert, ads for your book, paint, food, nice booze, a pony. Jesus Christ, some of this shit is creeping up on FUCKING HARVARD TUITION.

Silly as they are, vain as the grasping at status they represent might be, all of these make me sad—OK, not the Harvard tuition—because the Knowers know it isn’t rich people buying all this crap covered in logos.

As the recent “stealth wealth” movement “revealed” (I put “revealed” in scare quotes because Paul Fussell already went over this, what, thirty years ago?), people who don’t need to sacrifice anything to buy the EMERGENCY FLARE OF LOGOS (there’s a flair joke in there) won’t buy it anyway.

(I guess the sacrifice is what makes the ugly carpetbag a status symbol? But so ugly. SO UGLY.)

They know they’re richer than god, their friends know they’re richer than god, and the kind of silly insecurity that makes one crave a status symbol that everyone else can see from blocks away is rather more the curse of the thick-fingered vulgarian. There are plenty of lovely clothes made by Dior that don’t say DIOR on them (as though they were Dior’s gym shorts and he mustn’t lose them, and the purchaser is merely borrowing them because he forgot his own). Clothes made in real luxury fabrics and full leather; unless Mr. Really Rich is in a hurry, clothes that are usually custom-made for the real customer.

Meanwhile, those bespoke creations, expensive though they may be, are marginaly subsidized by the middle-class vulgarian tourist, as she tremblingly forks over her paltry thousands to be nonchalantly snatched for those barely-leather or frankly-carpet ready-wear bags which cost barely more than a Shopko bag to make.

And vulgarian as he is, when he pulls out his poor wallet, however fat, Mr. Thick-Fingers-Made-Rich-But-Not-as-Rich-as-He-Fantasizes-You-Imagine seems always vulnerable and sad.

So why does this incomprehensible purchasing behavior annoy me so?

It’s none of my business. So why do I want to strangle that dumb, fame-greedy kid from Colorado who owed me over a grand after I helped her out, but insisted she couldn’t pay me till she could instead buy the seizure-hideous Gucci sneakers she needed for her “Hollywood career”? (Well, aside from the “that’s kind of robbing me” part?)*

Neither a bag nor sneakers, but these $840 Gucci slippers offer you a luxurious footbed of… fake fur. (Calling fur made out of petroleum “eco-” anything is as absurd as calling this “luxury.”)

Probably because it makes me have to wonder about god damn it, AM I going blind?, as mentioned above. I’m already busy wondering about whether I’ve gone crazy. Don’t try to sell me a three-thousand-dollar visible fart and then tell me our eyes are all fine.

Or maybe I’m tired of sadness.

* “Ann goes to Los Angeles” is a dreadfully long story; we’ll piece it together one day.