It has long been a source of amused bemusement, or maybe bemused amusement, as to why America is so much more class-obsessed than England. I wouldn't like to style myself as a modern day Henry James (as one of Joni Mitchell's former entourage once memorably said, if you want to be compared to Picasso, maybe let someone else make that comparison) but I can't help but tap my lips with a quill pen about such matters and the differences between the Old and New Worlds.
Yes, yes, you lot have Tatler and Victoria Hervey (who has, rather tellingly, fled to the US where she isn't quite so heavily mocked), but as anyone who has ever been to NY Fashion Week can tell you, there ain't nowhere on this planet that fetishises an anonymous rich girl like New York. Allow me to direct you good people to one of the finest websites of the modern day, dedicated to printing glowing photos and fawning words about smiling people who do bugger all with their days.
But it's not the coverage that intrigues, just the veneration. If a woman is rich, beautiful, rich, photogenic, rich, chic, married to a royal and rich, she could try to set up the Fourth Reich and parkavenuepeerage.com would still insist that we all want to be just like her.
Take this entry about the Miller sisters. Now, the Miller girls, for those who have somehow heretofore missed out on them, are three undoubtedly very pleasant blonde ladies, Marie-Chantal, Alex and Pia, whose father owns every duty free shop in the world, or something. They all had very expensive weddings, were inevitably dubbed and, if memory serves, posed as the Three Graces, and have been fawned over by the American press ever since. Anyway, there's a totally random story about them on the adoring website, purely for an excuse to print photos of Marie-Chantal with her Greek prince husband. Now let's see who out there can spot the anomaly in this paragraph:
"Time has been friendly to the Millers. Pia Getty was divorced from her husband, the Internet entrepreneur and oil heir Christopher Getty, after having a fourth child with him but, after a reported reconciliation, is continuing to maintain their family's main residence in California. Alexandra von Furstenberg had a photo spread in Vogue recently; while she remains close friends with her husband Alexandre von Fürstenberg, who is still in a romantic relationship with fashion designer Ali Kay, she is actively single."
So let's see, two out of three of them might have got divorced but hey! That's OK! They still got photographed in some magazines so that's a happily ever after, surely. Never mind if in one recent interview Alex admitted that she was, as well as being, somewhat evocatively, "actively single", she also suffers from an eating disorder. But they're rich! And pretty! And rich! So really, they must be happy, yeah?
Thomas Jefferson, wherefore art thou?
