So That Shopping Spree…

October 23, 2008

I saw it mentioned in the comments and thought to myself, huh…a story that I’m uniquely qualified to comment on that I’m not commenting on. What is this? Who is better to address the supposed $150K Saks bill than the woman who only wishes she could spend enough time in Saks to rack up $150K? Believe you me, its not easy. To get to that amount of money, you’d have to spend a lot of time on the selling floor, or at least an hour in the Marc Jacobs purse boutique, or…and this is a pipe dream so I’ll just be out with it…ten minutes with an Hermes Birkin bag.

Which is why when I read this story, I thought to myself, how did they get to $150K dressing one chick who would look good if you put her in a pair of Paper Denim Cloth jeans and a University of Alaska sweatshirt and whose photo-shopped bikini shot, were it real, would have won the Republicans the election.

The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.

Now, call me a shopaholic or a total flake or what have you, but I’m not impressed by these numbers. Maybe its just me, but I’ve noticed, over the last few election cycles, Supreme Court nominations, Academy Awards red carpet shows, ten years worth of US Weekly, most of the life of E!: Entertainment Television and the whole of Joan Rivers career, that women enjoy nitpicking what other women wear, and most importantly, the media and entertainment media enjoy nitpicking about what other political women wear. If you want to hear horror stories about fashion journalism, just read through the archives we have around here that touch on the sensitive issue of the pantsuit. We’re brutal. If Sarah Palin walked out of her motorcade dressed in an ill-fitting shantung pant-suit with a too-short jacket and a pair of Payless heels, we’d have eaten her alive. And I’m nice to her, and here I am admitting to you, my loyal audience of five, that I, personally, would have taken her, brutally, to task for her choice of campaign finery. And I’m not even close to Perez Hilton.

Using Perez as a case study, and basing my opinion of the entertainment media solely on the fifteen seconds of his site that I can stand, let me just say that between the commentary on Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, I’ve learned that sexism is not only alive and well in this country, but its cleverly disguised as political humor. Yes, I’m cynical, but there’s no mistaking that calling someone “hot” in a condescending manner is a newly discovered way of putting someone down politically. Just think what would have happened if she’d been hot and poorly dressed?

That brings me, of course, to the choice of store. Neimans and Saks may be pricey, but there’s nowhere better to get quality clothes with designer or pseudo-designer labels. If you want the best and you don’t want to get picked apart mercilessly by a television anchor whom plastic surgery has kept in relative stasis for the last fifteen years, you’re going to have to pick from the cream of the crop. My guess is that they went with Oscar de la Renta, possibly some higher end Michael Kors, maybe some Christian Dior and Chanel if they needed some really nice stuff, or some good travel clothes, like the St. Johns that Cindy McCain often sports. Beyond that, she probably needed some travel wear (Eileen Fisher, Ellen Tracy and Elie Tahari come to mind), as well as good solid hosiery, a few pairs of those Cole Haan shoes with the Nike soles as well as a few pair of designer shoes for when her feet get photographed as they seem to do often. Add to that expensive makeup (because the best stuff is expensive), hair products, coats, gloves, bags, cases, brushes, and jewelry. Then add to that several tailored suits for her husband, who doesn’t seem like the type to own many, tailored suits for her son, lots of new clothes and accessories for her five children, and then some lower-end material for talk shows.

You’re at a serious bill right there. Add to that the salaries of full time stylists, hair and make up people, and a colorist.

Now, I don’t know if that quite makes it to $150K or whether the $150K is necessary, but you see, that’s the RNC’s problem. Not Sarah’s. We’ve long said that the RNC is out of touch with the Republican base and if you’ve suddenly discovered that, oh American media and great legions of liberal Obamatrons, well then you’ve just stumbled upon something we’ve known for years. If they think $150K is enough to dress a candidate, and they feel they want to shell that out in the interest of public relations, then I guess that’s their decision, but its representative of a fault we’ve been conditioned to ignore for a long time, assuming that the only choices we had in candidates were people who were hand-plucked from the Washington cocktail circuit or the local political machine: the people who are used to dishing out $2500-$5000 for a tailored suit from an exclusive Chicago retailer like Hartmarx (Obama, if you hadn’t guessed), and assuming that the only people who would ever be welcomed in government were people who flowed with the system, not against it. Sarah Palin represents, to so many, the idea that the Everyman Candidate who goes to Washington to deliver remarkable, Jimmy Stewart speeches at the end of 18-hour filibusters with the intent of changing the way that business is done in the city that represents everything we hate about government, is not lost in the archives of an out-of-business movie studio. If the RNC wants to screw that up by painting her with Guerlain and stuffing her into the $5K suits we all complain about, they’re creating their own monster. Sarah is the woman who stops at Wal-Mart for diapers. Its the RNC that hires $10K makeup artists.

Plus, I could probably do it for half or less with a few days and a Nordstrom Rack. Maybe I should contract out for her inevitable run at the Presidency or, if she loses, the Senate.

Huh.

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