Word: parvenu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...assumption in France, though, is that while a designer makes daytime clothing, his real arena is the evening. In a very successful show, Christian Lacroix produced dazzling ball gowns, grand, inventive yet harmonious. Erik Mortensen, of Jean-Louis Scherrer, had a couple of extravaganzas worthy of an Edith Wharton parvenu. Compared with these flights into fairyland, the Balmain show is almost severe. De la Renta's gowns show the most exquisite materials and embroidery but are presented, as it were, in translation -- to a modern idiom. The last-minute bolts of georgette appear in a series of elegant sheaths, delicately...
...movie begins, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), the senior v.p. of production at a major studio, feels his security eroding. An ambitious parvenu named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) has designs on Mill's job. Furthermore, an anonymous and extremely angry screenwriter keeps sending Mill a series of death-threats written on postcards. Unable to tell anyone what is happening, Mill takes matters into his own hands, killing a screenwriter and taking up with his girlfriend. However, the threats don't stop, and the movie is off and running...
...decision on their fate, which will rest with the International Olympic Committee, is of vital significance to the pride and profit of each parvenu sport's participants, impresarios, bureaucrats and merchandisers. Getting a sport recognized takes years of lobbying and piles of documents. Moments after he won the first ever moguls skiing gold medal, Edgar Grospiron of France shifted from exultation to exhortation. "After this," he told the press last week, "we will have to continue to work hard so that the other free-style skiing disciplines, ballet and aerials, also become medal events...