SO YOU THINK YOU CAN SING: Live Like You’re Dying at the American Music Award

Last night’s American Music Awards was such a train wreck of unfulfilled expectations that you could hardly blame one for thinking that the Obama administration, not Dick Clark Productions, must have been responsible for it.

I say that (only partly) because I’m not exactly sure that Dick Clark is even still alive. But when dead people who released no music this year win 5 awards (Michael Jackson), being alive was kinda beside the point at this spectacle.

So, for the most part, was singing live.

Things got off to an ominous start when Paula Abdul welcomed the audience into a dead microphone.

Then out came Janet Jackson who is apparently so grief stricken over Michael’s  death that she was inspired/used it as an opportunity to revive her decade long moribund career by dropping 20 pounds and a new greatest hits CD so she could lip synch and show off dance moves so dated that they’re in clear danger of being eligible for a revival.

Later in the show Jeniffer Lopez took pretty much the same route considering her career has been on life support  since “Waiting for Tonight,” which in 1999 turned out to be the anthem for ushering in the new Millennium. Last night she sang about leaving an uncooperative lover as she puts on impossibly expensive and vertiginous red soled  heels (Louboutins). Only  problem: she fell flat on her fabled asset while attempting her Katie Holmes-like dance moves and this morning she’s suffering  from a bruised ego (if not also a hip).

The highly cloying Taylor Swift who won 4 awards last night was on hand only via satelite from London where she was rehearsing for a concert at Wembley Arena. Keeping her off stage was perhaps the smartest move the producers could have made, considering she undeservedly (again) won the evening’s biggest award. Now the smartest thing she should do is call Debbie Gibson for career advice. And swiftly, as she’s at about moment 13 on her fame trajectory.

In the battle of the country divas, Keith Urban won handily against Carrie Underwood because he’s prettier and he  showed more cleavage.  But he also fared better because he  didn’t scream his trite lyrics   and his performance didn’t look as if someone had shaken a backwoods snow globe so that the awkward  moving Ms Underwood could appear as if she was engaging/engaged in some sort of dance number.

And herein lies the problem with much of last night’s telecast.  Most of the performers were overreaching for visual images instead of connecting to an audience– as if the overwrought visuals could possibly make up for  poorly written songs, the inability to carry a tune or just sheer lack of stage presence.

That’s what music videos are for.

The  performers who acquitted themselves with any dignity were the ones who actually sang.  By that I mean live and into their working microphones, most notably  Kelly Clarkson, Jay Z with Alicia Keys and Whitney Houston.

Coincidentally these were the 3 performances which brought down the house before the kitchy  and already overexposed Adam Lambert failed and, let’s be very clear, failed miserably to blow the roof off the place, as had been hyped.

Ms Clarkson got a much deserved standing ovation for her performance of “Already Gone,” a song essentially about knowing when to cut your losses. And boy does she.  She came, she sang, she conquered. How a singer this good and this smart wasn’t the big winner last night is beyond me.  Although she didn’t sound as perfectly heartbreaking as she did on VH1 Divas 2009 , she performed early enough in the show that by the time Jay Z came on to imperially command the room with “Empire State of Mind,” an ode to New York City as much as to his own undeniable artistic empire, she had already set the standard for the evening.

And by the time Whitney Houston came out in a glorious Kaufman Franco white gown, with beatific white stage lighting and a bad wig, it was a good thing Ms Clarkson was already gone. There’s just no denying that Ms Houston has irreparably damaged her voice with years and years of drug abuse but last night  in a gut wrenching confessional that lasted  a few fleeting minutes she managed to  use the detritus to her advantage in “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength,” a song about discovering your inner strength in the face of adversity.

That performance, at once delusional and pathetic but emotionally raw and brutally honest, brought to mind both Billie Holiday and Marianne Faithfull, women with drug ravaged voices which remain powerfully alive because they wear their heart on their sleeve and not because they wear us down with visual pyrotechnics.

TheBestDressedList.com

TomKolovos.com

 

Gucci Python Purse Porn

If you have to ask  then you can’t afford it. If you can afford it, you can ask  for 40% off Saturday November 21st at Gucci boutiques. Shh.

 

Bad Romance

Given that 2009 is the year of the bad romance (more to follow) this is the best music video of the year!

 

I’ve Seen a Million Dresses and I’ve Rocked the Mall

Tis the season.

I’ve been scouring the racks for  killer party dresses and this one is one of my favorites. The runway photo doesn’t begin to do it justice. It’s the LBD of the 2009 holiday season. Wear it as shown or strip it down with gladiator heels or layer it under a killer boyfriend jacket.

Aura one shoulder dress by Rag and Bone $435. At Intermix and Rag and Bone.

And just in case you can wait till March 2010 to take delivery of one of the most spectacular gowns you’re ever likely to see, order this one form Naeem Khan. Price available upon request.

TheBestDressedList.com

 

RESIMAY

This is an internet junk email joke that is just too good to not pass along, especially since the unemployment rate topped 10% today and we could all use a good laugh in these tough times. But don’t laugh too hard. This is pretty much the same way Sarah Palin got the 2008 Republican Vice Presidential nomination.

And considering reality TV couple Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt have written a book entitled  “How to Be Famous: Our Guide to Looking the Part, Playing the Press and Becoming a Tabloid Fixture,” consider yourselves lucky to be reading this instead!

To hoom it mae cunsern,

I waunt to apply for the job what I saw in the paper.

I can Type realee quik wit one finggar and do sum a counting..

I think I am good on the phone and I no I am a pepole person,
Pepole really seam to respond
to me well. Certain men and all the ladies.

I no my spelling is not to good but fi nd that I Offen can get a job thru my persinalety.

My salerery is open so we can discus wat you want to pay me and wat you think that I am werth,

I can start emeditely.  Thank you in advanse fore yore anser.

hopifuly Yore best aplicant so farr.

Sinseerly,

BRYAN

PS : Because my resimay is a bit short – below is a pickture of me.

Employer’s response:

Dear Bryan ,

It’s OK honey, we’ve got spell check.

See you Monday.

TheBestDressedLIst.com

 

The Women (1929/1939/2009)

Even if Jodi Kantor’s  essay “The First Marriage” in the New York Times Magazine  didn’t have the misfortune of appearing in the same Sunday edition as  the extraordinary continuing series “Women at Arms,” which today highlighted the  difficulties women veterans face when diagnosed with with post traumatic stress disorder from the Iraq/Afganistan wars, it would still come off as a thoughtless, tone deaf and premature hagiography of Michelle Obama. (Yes, the real subject here is not the marriage but Michelle. Surprise.)

You don’t have to be a raving fringe political lunatic (Liz Cheney comes to mind) to notice that even though Ms Kantor’s aim is to illuminate how the Obamas “mix politics and romance in a way that no first couple have before,” her tiresome analysis (and dubious premise) is short on history and long on the two-married-professionals-with-children cliches better suited to the ilk of celebrity rags and television chat shows.

And you don’t have to be Virginia Woolf to know that intelligent and ambitious  women have historically sacrificed so the men in their lives get ahead. (Wo)Man bites dog circa 1929.

Compared with the two most obvious political high wire duo marriages of the last century,  The Kennedys and the Clintons, The Obama’s balancing act comes off as cotidian. (Perhaps that’s the way in which it it’s “modern,”  by which Ms Kantor surely means contemporary, but as I said history is not her forte.)

There’s nothing here  that any one of us out here in a long term relationship hasn’t experienced and nothing newsworthy about the balancing act all of us have to achieve in  life once we grow up and realize that balance and compromise (if we’re lucky) is all there is. The Obamas spent a lot of time apart when Barack ran for political office. They weren’t making a lot of money. They couldn’t all be there for the girls’ activities.  Barack thought he could go it alone. Michelle never signed up to be a political wife. Michelle’s character and support were invaluable to Barack’s success. Yada yada yada.

You mean to tell us, Ms Kantor, that Pat Nixon knowingly signed on for the disgrace of Watergate? Laura Bush for the the alcoholism and coke fueled benders? Hillary for the public infidelities? Nancy Reagan for the 10 years of home nursing? Jackie Kennedy for the blood splattered head of her husband in her lap?

It simply does not occur to Ms Kantor that,  given what could possibly go wrong in a  political marriage, the way she portrays the Obama’s marriage as a  shiny new model of “modernity” just a year into the job, she’s completely overreaching.

Her obtuseness reaches its nadir when she walks “into the Hyde Park apartment the Obama’s bought when they married, hoping to find clues to their old lives. The cramped master bedroom,” she proudly observes, “had a closet barely big enough for one wardrobe. Where did Michelle keep her clothes?” Excuse  me?

The marriage of Jacqueline Bouvier into the crass Kennedy clan was seminal to the political career of JFK. So even if we start there, the very notion that Mrs Obama was intent on upscaling her husband’s office space, his venues for public appearances  and ultimately humanizing him by appearing in public and speaking on his behalf speaks both to the naivete of Ms Kantor and to the valuable image savvy of Mrs Obama.

The wide latitude that Mrs Obama can enjoy in her role  as First Lady, is in no small part due to the trailblazing legacy of Hillary Clinton, so it’s snarky on the part of Ms Kantor to  both oversimplify the comparisons between the Clintons and the Obamas and then to take cheap shots at Mrs Clinton’s expense. “While the Clinton marriage seems forged in shared beliefs about the promise of politics, the Obama union has been a decades-long debate about whether politics could be an effective avenue for social change.” Clinton bad. Obama good. Got it. Thanks.

She continues: Michelle “also played a vital role in heading off the most promising female candidate in United States history. It was essential for the Obama campaign to present some sort of accomplished female counterweight to Hillary Clinton, to convince Democratic women that they could vote for Barack Obama and a powerful female figure besides. Consciously or not, Michelle made herself into an appealing contrast to the front-runner. She was candid; Hillary was often guarded. Michelle represented the idea that a little black girl from the South Side of Chicago could grow up to be first lady of the United States; Hillary stood for the hold of the already-powerful on the political system. And Michelle seemed to have the kind of marriage many people might aspire to; Hillary did not.”

And then there’s this. Kantor reports that “as a first-time candidate, Barack could be stiff; friends remember him talking to voters with his arms folded, looking defensive. Michelle warmed everyone up, including her husband. “She is really Bill, and he is really Hillary,” one friend recently put it.” We get it. She’s not Hillary.

As I was reading the essay I was reminded how much of the seriously misguided effort by Ms Kantor could easily be remade as  a screwball comedy, let’s just say the George Cukor classic 1939 film of Clare Boothe Luce’s play The Women. It would take  some time to figure out which First Lady and in which way Ms Kantor has maligned whom so I could align them with the the cast of the film, but I think it could be done.

Jungle red mother.

TheBestDressedList.com

TomKolovos.com

 

MORE FAGS, MORE FUN

I’m pretty sure the Catholic Church doesn’t like gay people because in its experience gay people are a pain in the ass. Sort of how Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots) must have felt about Queen Elizabeth I.

Given that Jesus said not a single word in the Bible about homosexuality, the utter contempt that the Catholic hierarchy has for gays is in large part understandable because it is informed by its perverse experience of conflating  homosexuality with  the rampant unchecked pedophilia in its ranks and the laundry list of sins committed in the still persistent cover up.

In the movie “Heathers,” when Winona Ryder is asked point blank “why are you such a bitch?” the only possible answer is “because I can be.” You can’t imagine  what a terrorist bitch the Catholic Church is in the lives of gay people.  Consider, for example, the complicated dance between the Catholic Church and the breakaway factions of the Anglican Church (Episcopalians in the US), a dance which began back when Henry XIII picked a little fight with the Vatican over some women and their inability to produce little boy babies.

This week, the Pope and the entire Catholic hierarchy, which  has been/ still is pardoning and harboring child molesters in its ranks for God only knows how long, is now openly accepting  disgruntled homophobic married Anglicans priests and their congregations who object to such 21st century nonsense as openly gay or female clergy and gay civil unions (and  let’s not forget condoms) into the Catholic fold.

(I left the Anglican Church and all I got was this lousy T-shirt: YOU HATE GAY PEOPLE? WELCOME. PSSSST: AND IF YOU WANNA F**K SOME LITTLE BOYS TOO, NO PROBLEM! We’ve got a primo 9 year old or two with the body of 7  a year old. Right this way.)

This move, while characteristically reactionary, is not altogether unfathomable since historically the Church hasn’t exactly been in the vanguard of human rights or anything that might be called progress. Western history of the last 500 years can plausibly be seen as one giant bitch slap to the Vatican.

When you consider that Martin Luther declared “every man his own priest” and led  the Protestant Reformation which gave rise to the political theory of John Locke  which led to the Declaration of Independence, the much vaunted Vatican II  did nothing more than bring the Catholic Church straight into the 16th century.

Homosexuality, thus understood, is understandably a pain the ass.  So what could possibly be wrong with something to ease the pain? Think of homophobia as the Catholic Church’s answer to universal health care. Happy gay people and openly gay clergy? Not in this 16th century or any other.

It shouldn’t surprise the world, I suppose, that a German Pope who was a member of the Nazi youth, where homoerotica was more rampant than an Abercrombie + Fitch ad campaign, would throw a welcome party for homophobes. After all, the last time the Germans threw a party, they threw a Holocaust. “Burn, baby burn. It’s a disco inferno.”

Yes, the Jews were the first order of business of the Third Reich but gays were the second. You’d think that the Church would be inclined to learn from its mistakes. In a recent essay, Ginia Bellafante assessed the rise and fall of the subjects of  real estate reality shows lamenting that the Bravo hit Flipping Out “lays fraud to the idea that misfortune builds character and makes us better people. Mr. Lewis does not become a better person. He remains greedy, petulant, small-minded, arrogant without justification, ill-tempered, ungenerous — singularly detestable.” Il Papa is in the house.

Projecting his own Nazi past and the misery of pedophiles onto gay people is doubly detestable.  And no fun at all. Maybe next June “God’s Rottweiller” should go to Gay Days at Disney in Orlando and meet Kitty Meow for a Red Bull summit.

It might be instructive for the entire Church to see how “the happiest place on earth,” a creation of  a closeted gay man named Walt Disney, and the very place which once scorned gay people in the name of “family values,” now welcomes them by the hundreds of thousands each year during the first week in June.

Hey Ben, you don’t know what fun is until you’ve been bumping and grinding on a dance floor at  MGM studios, as you look up to the heavens and see  Kitty Meow, Chyna Girl and Power lip synch to the throbbing techno beat remix of Mary Mary’s spiritual “Shackles” (“take the shackles off my feet so I can dance, I just wanna praise You”)  and doing scissor kicks, each on a 3 story cherry picker, while climactically strategic fireworks explode  behind the Magic Kingdom. Unspeakable joy!

While the world has changed enough that gay tattooed love boys  can be found partying and tripping on the dance floor  to the drum and base beat (shirtless and flaunting their six packs, great America) at Gay Days, you don’t have to be Einstein, baby, to see that Pope Ben is flipping out.

Benedict XVI (or as he will properly be known in American human rights circles, Benedict Arnold II) is guilt tripping on  internalized self loathing  and bumping and grinding to the drumbeat of the ideology of the Nazi party of his youth. “No blacks no Jews and no gays.” No if and or but for the grace of God there go I.

But what do I know? I’m just a boy standing in front of a Pope asking him to love me. ( I’ll follow you around until you love me, Papa, Papanazi.)

Good thing I refuse to kneel.

TheBestDressedList.com

TomKolovos.com

 

Every picture tells a story, don’t it?

All dressed up and nowhere to go? You’re not alone.

You’ve got the 4 models in the Victor Skrebneski produced fashion feature in the 27th anniversary issue of Today’s Chicago Woman to keep you company.  Spread on the floor, each in a 2 page spread,  in various stages of orgasmic exhibitionism which every couture clad professional gal surely finds herself now and again and again, the first model appears to be using her bejeweled bangled hand to pocket pool herself and, when she reappears at the end, she’s using her entire forearm to anally….WTF?

“Success stories don’t get much better than this” proclaims the cover. Really? Yes, the caption does, in all fairness, refer to the real estate agent on the cover but who cares about her and her success when Skrebneski locates the multiple listing service in your G spot?

In stark contrast, and  as conceived by Maurizio Cattelan and  photographed by Pierpaolo Ferrari, the cover of the November issue of W magazine is  part of what the editors describe as a “politically and religiously charged portfolio” starring Linda Evangelista.

I can’t guarantee that what you’ll find inside the pages of the 4th annual “art issue” has any more or less artistic merit than what you find inside Today’s Chicago Woman, but  I am sure that the cover photo has a  politically charged urgency that taps into the global zeitgeist and that stops you dead in your tracks as it sets your mind racing.

Here’s the surreal juxtaposition of Linda”I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day” Evangelista, the most cinematic of the 80’s “greed is good” supermodels, a good deal more rotund  than current standards allow but no less the superb “still actress” she always was, holding a cardboard sign that declares “IT MUST BE SOMEBODY’S FAULT.”

As obvious as the cardboard sign is to read (and agree with if it refers to the global economic meltdown), what it means depends on how you read it. For starters, where in that sentence is the correct inflection? (Fans of the masterful film writer and director John Sayles will recall the “I didn’t ask for the anal probe” scene from Passion Fish.)

And how does one read that sign given the rest of the images in the photo?

She’s is, after all, wearing an Oscar de la Renta dress and $1,699,000.00 in De Beer’s diamond jewelry including a double cross. She’s perfectly manicured, coiffed and made up but the expression on her face is alarmingly vacant.  What, if anything, is really bothering, bewildering and bewitching her? An American flag can be seen  clearly affixed to a building behind her. The gaze of the suited black male is ambiguously affixed to her? To us? To the studly white uniformed male intruding in the right foreground?

Who is she? Victim? Perpetrator? Prophet? Judge? Jury? Grand Inquisitor?  Who are the men and who are they to her?

And what is IT? The spectacular fall of the supermodel? The divulsion of the unregulated derivative/Bernie Madoff ponzi economy?  The inability of Miley Cyrus to, like,  construct a proper sentence in, like, English ? The collapse of the luxury goods market? Is she sympathetic or pathetic?

Life imitated art Thursday night, making the timing of the politically and religiously charged portfolio even more prescient, at a town hall meeting in New Orleans where President Obama was asked by Tyren Scott, a  4th-grader, “Why do people hate you? And why, aren’t they supposed to love you, if God is love?”

The President came up with an unfortunately  simplistic and patronizing answer, as if to prove that you can graduate from Harvard and teach at the University of Chicago, but you’re still not smarter than a 4th grader. When Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd have lost any semblance of faith in your competence, you’re just stroking your own oversize ego when you declare:

“First of all, I did get elected president, so not everybody hates me; I got a whole lot of votes. A lot of it is what’s called politics, where once one party wins, the other party feels like they’ve got to poke you a little bit to keep you on your toes. So you shouldn’t take it too seriously.”

Seriously, Tyren, IT MUST BE SOMEBODY’S FAULT. And after 9 months of on the job ineptitude on foreclosure reform, health care reform, banking reform, immigration reform. ‘don’t ask don’t tell” reform and evisceration of every campaign promise by special interest politics, the fault lies squarely with Barck Obama. Location, location, location.

Good art sometimes thrives on ambiguity and even derives its meaning from it. Political leadership does not.

TheBestDressedList.com

tomkolovos.com

 

Love in the Time of Cholera (2009)

Hopelessly inarticulate, short, portly, poorly dressed, perpetually sweaty, his face toxically red from razor burn but not shame, graduate from the “don’t expect a Supreme Court justice to come from there anytime soon” John Marshall Law School, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has got to be looking at Barack Obama right now and laughing at him as if he were Beyonce Clown from YouTube.

Because they don’t give Nobel prizes to the likes of  Henry Kissinger over Gandhi (or political immunity to child molesters  like Roman Polanski) anymore, Richard Daley was overlooked by the Nobel committee.

Chicago politics is infamous for corruption.  Well articulated pleasantries, transparency and full disclosure were run out of this town long before the gentrification began. (We’re happy enough not to be Florida, the state responsible for the coup d’etat that was the 2000 election.)

Daley, the Father and  the Son, and the wholly spirited voters can proclaim we built this city in 6 decades.  And on an unusually warm night last November, we rested on our laurels as the whole world watched us rebuild this city, Barack, and all.

Daley was named as best mayor in the US–and it wasn’t because of his ability to put together a  stirring sentence in proper English but because he gets things done.  It was  because he was able to put the right cronies–sorry, civic minded supporters– including his brother into the Clinton administration, in the right place at the right time to get what he wanted: to make this scrappy little two horse town (which his father had inherited as a one horse town) into a world class city, critics, ethics, the media, his constituents, longtime friends, and common decency (anyone remember how callously and shamelessly he ruined Miriam Santos‘ political career so he could save his own?) be damned.

There’s a fine line between a benevolent dictator and  Dick Cheney, and Rich Daley knows exactly where that is.

It’s a safe bet to say that with the possible exception of his wife, no one loves Richard Daley.  A handful of people may have good reason to hate him, but everyone fears Richard Daley. More accurately put, people fear that he has and can use political clout  against them if they don’t line up behind him. That, my dear, is called effective leadership. Perhaps Daley will buy Obama a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince for Christmas.  Or perhaps Oprah might add Gabriel Garcia Marquez to her book club. We  can put the books on lay away  for him since the city doesn’t have enough money at the moment. (Blame it on Rio.)

As Bill Clinton and George W Bush showed us, we will tolerate, admire even, highly flawed individuals in politics if they know how to fight, fight back and fight dirty even as, or despite that, they cleanse their souls of their inner demons well within public view, whether it’s to compensate for being daddy’s abandoned little lamb or the black sheep of the family.

The racist lunatic fringe of the Republican Party (hard to miss) and drug addicted talk show hosts (hard to miss but hard to imprison?) who rant about deporting immigrants while they run the Hispanic maid, who they forced into being  their drug runner, out of the country so she can’t be found by prosecutors, don’t fear  Obama the man. They fear the effects of the changing racial demographics that will  challenge their social order. No one fears  President Barack Obama.

As Jimmy “lust in my heart” Carter and George “kinder and gentler” Bush proved, we’ve got only so much political tolerance for an ineffectual do gooder. We like leaders willing to get down and dirty. There comes a time when we tire of you running your mouth about your “achey breaky heart” — just ask all those pissed off queens last night at the Human Rights Campaign Fund gala who paid $1000 a person to be patronized–and we want to see you put up a fight.  And win.

All love, most especially political love, is conditional. Put out or get out. Put up or shut up. Just do it.

And as Lady Gaga so aptly  sang to the crowd last night, “baby when it’s love, if it’s not rough it isn’t fun.”

TomKolovos.com

 

Lindsay Lohan wins surprise Nobel Peace Prize as Creative Director of Emanuel Ungaro

Yes she can. Don’t laugh. After today anything is possible. Chic happens. All you need is a visioning board.

Stop laughing and compare, side by side, the statements of Mounir Moufarrige, the chief executive of Emanuel Ungaro and Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee , as published in The New York Times.

ON MR OBAMA: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said in its citation. “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

“Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics,” the committee wrote. “Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.”

ON MS LOHAN: The market for luxury goods has been so bad, he said, that hiring a traditional designer would not make enough of a difference to get people into his stores. With retailers cutting their orders by 30 percent or more this year, there was little chance that Ungaro could survive without getting more attention. He said he did not believe that Ms. Lohan’s history of well-publicized personal problems would get in the way of her job at Ungaro or have a detrimental impact on the brand.

At that moment, his cell phone rang. It was a security guard telling him that Ms. Lohan and her sister, Ali, had gone downstairs into the store to try on some clothes. The store, in fact, was now mobbed.

ON MR OBAMA: Interviewed later in the Nobel Committee’s wood-paneled meeting room, surrounded by photographs of past winners, Mr. Jagland brushed aside concerns expressed by some critics that Mr. Obama remains untested.

“The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world,” Mr. Jagland said. “And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

He compared the selection of Mr. Obama with the award in 1971 to the then West German Chancellor Willy Brandt for his “Ostpolitik” policy of reconciliation with communist eastern Europe.

“Brandt hadn’t achieved much when he got the prize, but a process had started that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Mr. Jagland. “The same thing is true of the prize to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, for launching perestroika. One can say that Barack Obama is trying to change the world, just as those two personalities changed Europe.”

ON MS LOHAN: Ms. Lohan represents a modern version of a fashion muse. She is an actress who is being paid — with a deal reported to be worth millions — to serve as artistic adviser, most unlike the classic image, for example, of Loulou de la Falaise, the dear friend of Saint Laurent and daughter of the model Maxime de la Falaise, who would gently nudge a bow and whisper to the great couturier that it looked chicer that way.

Mr. Moufarrige, during an interview in his office above the Ungaro store on Avenue Montaigne, argued that the controversy could still be good for the brand. He pointed out that he has made controversial hires in the past that ultimately were vindicated, noting that he replaced Karl Lagerfeld with Stella McCartney, the daughter of Paul McCartney, at Chloé in 1997. Though Ms. McCartney’s appointment indeed ruffled feathers among the French design establishment, she did have formal design training and has since gone on to develop a successful signature line.

ON MR OBAMA: “We have to get the world on the right track again,” he said. Without referring specifically to the Bush era, he continued: “Look at the level of confrontation we had just a few years ago. Now we get a man who is not only willing but probably able to open dialogue and strengthen international institutions.”

ON MS LOHAN: Mounir Moufarrige, the chief executive of the company, acknowledged in an interview that the move would likely create waves among French fashion purists, possibly even charges of bad taste, but he argued that the times called for a maneuver he likened to “electric shock treatment.” Sales of the high-end Ungaro collection have dropped substantially since Mr. Ungaro sold his business in 1996, and none of the designers hired to replace him since his retirement five years ago have managed to draw much attention to the label.

“She knows the difference between what looks good, what is not and what is cool,” Mr. Moufarrige said. “Celebrities today attract a lot of attention and having a moving, dancing, swinging, living doll is, we hope, going to bring down the age group at Ungaro while keeping the DNA.”

ON  MR OBAMA: “We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future, but for what he has done in the previous year,” Mr. Jagland said. “We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.”

ON MS LOHAN: “A designer alone is not enough to get us back where we were, unless I had Tom Ford or Phoebe Philo,” he said. “But there are not many of those, and they are taken.”

“We could spend two or three years with a designer and get a great collection again,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean people will buy it. Everybody’s got a nice collection.” But a celebrity, that’s another story, and one who draws the spotlight just for selling a line of leggings couldn’t do worse. “I looked at several, and they all had the same ingredients,” Mr. Moufarrige said. “If you are a celebrity, you may be controversial and prone to a lot of problems, but you attract a lot of attention.”

So, are you still laughing? I wonder if Kanye West will accompany Ms Lohan to Oslo in December.

TheBestDressedList.com