I admit that at times I end up feeling like a background character in that scene of William Klein’s Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? in which Miss Maxwell - editor in chief of a famous fashion magazine, opinion maker and, well, bitch - stands up at the end of Ducasse's catwalk show (that only featured unwearable and bizarre outfits), and magniloquently claims "He’s recreated woman!" and everybody suddenly agrees with her. In a nutshell, I quite often find myself disagreeing with people, to the point that I simply can't understand what the fuss is all about. I had this feeling for example when seeing Fendi's "Bag Bugs" during the Autumn/Winter 2013-14 runway show.
The Bag Bugs are nothing more than cartoonish leather trimmed fox and mink monster heads that you clip to your keys or to your bag and carry around like lucky charms.
Apart from the fact that the name makes me think about bed bugs and therefore conjures up visions of dreadful student accomodations and dirty mattresses, I admit that I didn't feel overcome with joy or desire when I first saw them, in fact the first thing that came to my mind was Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. No, I didn't actually have in mind any tribal references, but something more horrific, specifically the shrunken heads outside Mr Kurtz's hut.
Surely, I thought, Fendi Creative Director Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi (who apparently also came up with their names - Snobius, Furyou, Nutty and Wild Jess...) must have spent a lot of time surfing the Internet for ideas, before stumbling upon a children's craft page that taught you how to make fun DIY shrunken heads from apples and pom poms and then decided to play a practical joke on people by making them with fur. Then a PR officer cleverly turned the joke into something else, describing the accessories in grand words in a press release and these fur balls suddenly became fashionable.
A twee video in a palette that may have been borrowed from a Wes Anderson film was released today on Fendi.com to celerate and advertise these useless yet painfully hip monsters (whose features also appear in a collection of purses, shoes and bags) currently sold also in a dedicated pop up shop at Harrods in London.
Yet, however I try, I can't see their overpowering appeal also from a functional and practical point of view. I mean if you have to kill an animal to wear its luxuriously soft skin, at least make something useful with it like a coat or a jacket rather than a useless appendage (yes, I know, many fashionable items are created with a merely decorative purpose in mind, but there is a subtle line between decorative and kitsch...). Besides, my vividly neurotic imagination keeps on conjuring up Kurtz's shrunken heads every time I look at these monster heads.
Maybe, though, my imagination playing tricks on me has also got something to do with the price of these accessories, ranging between Euro 390 and Euro 470. Am I the only one hearing in the distance Kurtz's final, chilling statement - "The horror! The horror!"?
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