Word: swankness
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...home truths may prove useful at this point. One comes courtesy of the uncrowned duke of drop-dead swank, Karl Lagerfeld: "There's no fashion if nobody buys it." Second are the words of Anne-Marie Dubois-Dumée, who assists Maxfield's owner, Tommy Perse: "We're consumers." Now that that has been cleared up, we can-consumers all-move for a moment right into the heavy duty...
...true snob is a complex character. He is not merely a status seeker in Vance Packard's sense of the term, or a simple showoff. (Still, touches of artful swank are essential-the polo mallet cast casually onto the back seat of the car, or the real, working buttonholes on jacket sleeves that betray the Savile Row suit.) The authentic snob shows it by his attitude toward his superiors and his inferiors. Gazing upward, he apes and fawns and aspires to a gentility that is not native to him; looking down, he snubs and sniffs and sneers at those...
...special kick from seeing cocaine merchants stripped of their fancy possessions. Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police department ended last year with a $2.5 million surplus thanks to its expropriated share of local dealers' loot. Some cocaine tycoons are prosperous enough to shrug off the loss of a swank beach house or a DC-3 (fitted out with extra fuel tanks for long intercontinental coke flights) as business overhead. Still, says DEA Agent William Schnepper: "It's what hurts them the most. Not only do they go to prison, but they come out with no treasure socked away...
...sensory overload-the perfume, rooms decorated (courtesy of Cardin) to look like Maxim's, the Offenbach piped in like a sound track for an ancient travelogue-"La Belle Epoque" is less an evocation of mood or an exhibition of high style than it is an exaltation of swank, of money, of society. In that sense it is about fashion, not clothes, historical re-creation without historical perspective...
THINGS GET EMBARRASSINGLY QUIET at University Hall during the warm months. The Summer School bureaucracy, located in far less swank digs on Garden St. manages the temporary inhabitants of the Yard. College officials sit behind their desks and go through the motions, but June, July and August are notoriously slow for administrators in Cambridge as well as students at the beach...