When bling’s not the thing

There is in existence an unflattering photograph of Anna Wintour, the famous ice queen and Vogue editor. You can’t imagine my relief. Having spent 33-odd days in lockdown, raking up fallen leaves and darning unworthy sweaters, I am far from Wintour’s immaculate world. But that scrap of photographic evidence transports me to a magic space where I’m within a whiff of luxury.

I was once given a Prada wallet. Like a ratbag in an old-fashioned novel who bites gold to check it’s real, I held the wallet to my nose and smiled. Nylon just doesn’t cut it.

I liked that wallet a lot until I dropped it in the gutter one pouring, rainy night and couldn’t find it in the flooded street when I went back for it.

I can imagine Wintour having dumb accidents like that because she wears dark glasses 24/7, and having seen that image of her without them I relate to why.

She has wrinkles and bags like all women of a certain age. She may be a goddess, but her skin says she’s not a newborn one, and I am insanely pleased.

My luxuries have been minor, hers mega and everyday. Like many executives she has just taken a 20 per cent pay cut as an executive of the parent publisher of Vogue, but she’ll have plenty left over for guinea-pig legs to slather with truffles, and something elegant and silky to slip into at the gym. She will never know the reek of poverty.

I’m thinking of luxury just now because it’s out of reach. It’s not the same when you’re shopping on the internet, and when you can’t smell luxury you can’t be sure of recognising it. A bookshelf full of New Zealand magazine titles collapsed when Covid-19 took hold, which was a local tragedy. Now the Vogue stable of glossies, even with the celebrated Wintour at the helm, faces a fight for survival in what became almost overnight a changed world.

I’m sorry about that because glossies represent the impossible, and fantasy is a necessity. When you can’t have perfection you can at least look at it. You may even make a new cushion cover as a sign that you’ve seen something you can’t have.

A world in free fall thanks to something you can’t even see puts many things into perspective. Obviously garments that cost thousands are one of them, and the feverish craving to wear expensive brand logos starts to look pathetic.

When millions face unemployment, let alone possible sickness and death, everything about bling-ridden families like the Trumps has an unpleasant reek, of vulgarity rather than luxury.

If you have that much money to fling around on non-essentials, maybe you should be helping someone who hasn’t. But kindness is a different kind of luxury, and decency isn’t a label. No profits there.

There’s a documentary about Wintour in which former Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley is shown getting exercise at her command. Talley is a very large man, apt to wear kaftans, and the sequence of him standing still with his tennis racket waving listlessly at the ball while he declines to move the rest of him is very funny and relatable.

His just-published memoir, though, reveals that toiling for luxury had a downside. His former boss left him, Talley says, with ‘‘emotional and psychic scars’’.

I hope Conde Nast finds a path through to a new reality, and that our print magazines are revived. But causing that degree of misery to someone is not what anyone would call elegant or aspirational. Wintour sounds like just another boring old bully.