Attention shoppers, check out Gwyneth in the Bazaar aisle
Gwyneth Paltrow is strutting down a supermarket aisle.
As one does when dashing out to pick up eggs at Sobey’s, she’s wearing a Louis Vuitton jacket atop a $340 (U.S.) Proenza Schouler swimsuit. The purse she’s clutching, also from Louis Vuitton, will set you back $3,800, or roughly 2,700 cans of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup (it’s on sale this week).
Unlike your uncle Larry, who inspects potential apricots in the ambulating comfort of black socks and running shoes, Paltrow’s manicured toes are squeezed into $995 Saint Laurent heels.
Her Bulgari necklace, as with the jacket, is listed in the caption as “price upon request,” which I believe is directed at ready-to-wear consumers and is haughty fashion code for “don’t bother asking.”
Shot by Alexi Lubomirski for the November issue of Harper’s Bazaar, the image is sublimely ridiculous. Like a child posing behind the wheel of a monster truck, Paltrow looks to be having a blast doing something new. The juxtaposition between the Goop founder and rows of cheap condiments is perfect.
The aspiring lifestyle mogul who once said, “I’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin” has eyes that now say, “So this is how it feels to be so close to dry linguine and iodized salt! It’s not so bad!”
Paltrow is on the magazine cover. But you can safely skip that. It’s the images inside the issue — from this absurd photo shoot at a Brooklyn grocery store that accompanies a Q&A with Paltrow and Samantha Bee — that are the blessed diversion.
We all need a break from the U.S. election. Now that Donald Trump has stumbled into the final act of his doomed reality show, now that the villain has doused himself with kerosene and is about to self-immolate on Twitter and Fox News, we’ll need entertainment to extinguish the flames and ease us back into a pre-Trump normal.
We’ll need a steady diet of fluff to see us through.
So for the next month, guilty pleasures are hereby elevated to daily essentials.
Please allow the most inane and superficial tentacles of popular culture to wrap around your battered soul and wipe away the raging spittle of Trump as he dry-humps the low road and blames everyone else for his own profound failures as a human.
Forget his revolting “locker-room talk” garbage by taking comfort in stories about Miley Cyrus’s pansexuality. Rid yourself of the horrors of his orange patina by thinking about something far less frightening, say, the current pandemic of creepy clowns. Watch new episodes of The Bachelorette Canada or Dancing With the Stars and enjoy these mindless distractions even more knowing his poisonous mind will soon be bottled in formaldehyde and relegated to a crypt of cultural oblivion.
I’m telling you, in the home stretch of the most demented election in memory, it’s downright cathartic to stare at these crazy supermarket pictures of Paltrow.
They are a balm for eyes and hearts.
Just look at her, sideways grinning in a swimsuit and designer blazer, holding open the dairy cooler to retrieve a plastic jug of milk like it’s a magnum of Armand de Brignac Brut Gold and she’s on a yacht outside Saint-Tropez at sunset.
Just look at her, leaning over a cart of Lucky Charms as her derriere in a goop Label dress ($595) makes surface contact with a box of Honey Nut Chex.
Her Manolo Blahnik is wedged next to a box of Cocoa Puffs, which is the closest Paltrow has ever come to sugary cereal.
Gaze into her quizzical expression for more than 20 seconds and you’ll forget 80 per cent of every vile thing Trump uttered in his anti-social lunge for power.
Then there is the image of Paltrow in an Eres bikini ($290 for the top; $240 for the bottom), in which she’s clearly violating several health codes, perched as she is on a conveyor belt in a checkout lane.
An elderly couple looks to Paltrow’s right with muted concern.
That’s when it will hit you: Their expression is nothing compared to what everyone would have experienced over the next four years if a President Trump had managed to plop down on the U.S. conveyor belt of domestic and foreign policy.
It’s really starting to look like the world dodged a bullet. And when that is confirmed next month, we should all hoist jugs of milk and celebrate with Cocoa Puffs. vmenon@thestar.ca
We’ll need a steady diet of fluff to see us through. So for the next month, guilty pleasures are hereby elevated to daily essentials