Word: parvenu
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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...
That sense of belonging seems to gentle his judgments. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the builder of his family's fortune (and of the New York Central Railroad), was a whiskey-swilling, street-fighting parvenu who bullied his wife and children, cheated the public and gave away pittances from the $100 million he amassed. Auchincloss notes, a bit sorrowfully, that Vanderbilt and his colleagues in stiff-collar crime like Jay Gould would not find themselves out of place on Drexel Burnham Lambert's Wall Street. Still, the author can find it in his heart to suggest that the commodore's coarseness...
Brook meticulously undercuts or complicates every stereotype with a welcome particularity. The crucial performance is by Film Star Brian Dennehy (Silverado, F/X) as a benevolent yet diffident Lopakhin, less a brash parvenu than a man poignantly conscious of his humble origins and clumsily trying to fit in. He is in his own way just as dreamy as Lyubov (Natasha Parry), the estate's spendthrift owner, whom he constantly upbraids for her impracticality. She ignores the impending auction of her home because any available means to "save" it would change and therefore destroy it. When Lopakhin cannot recruit...