Snob Appeal
The era of bare buttocks on billboards in L.A. has passed, apparently. Or maybe sex appeal is just a summer/seasonal thing. The current crop of roadside reading features ads that can only be based on snob appeal.
Sunglasses, of course, never go out of season in a city where rain is so rare that people come out and stare at it as if frogs were falling from the sky. So a drive along Sunset Blvd now offers humungous images of thin 12 year old girls with their hair slicked back and a giant pair of sunglasses perched on their tiny noses. I noticed, in particular, a pair which featured the initials of the designers in huge gold letters on the temples.
There is, as far as I can tell, no marked difference in these sunglasses and the ones you can buy for $9.99 at the gas station, except that the massive glasses worn by the starveling 12 year old have the D&G on them.
Lest anyone miss the point, value is now based not on quality but on exclusivity. This was baldly displayed by a nightclub near the famed Chateau Marmont which took for its name PRIVILEGE. Decked in white and blue, it had a grand opening last year, and even Keanu was there. (He has a friend known as a “celebrity wrangler” who has apparently made an entire career out of getting Keanu to go to nightclubs where he gamely has one drink and then vanishes, never to return.) I’m happy to note that PRIVILEGE folded almost the minute Keanu walked out.
But the baldest stance of all is currently on a billboard right over Gil Turner’s liquor store on the corner of Sunset and Doheny in Weho. Belvedere vodka is… “not poured into every martini. Only the right ones.” Alas, I’ll never know if it’s really that remarkable. I buy my shoes at Payless; surely Belvedere vodka would refuse to leave the bottle for someone like me.
