This is stylist Kate Young, famous for her work on shows, campaigns and celebs including Natalie Portman, Derek Lam and Target. This nowhere near describes her talent but google her later if you need to.
Kate's trademark bleached blonde locks are ultra-cool and she always looks like any right-thinking fashionable person would wish to. Meandering through the webrooms of mars last night I noticed an interview where she confessed that sometimes, when she goes over to the East Side with black roots, shop assistants are mean to her. What? Not glad anyone could be mean to a super-stylist of course, just fascinated that even she, for pity's sake, gets the cold shoulder treatment in East Side shops. Because to get respect over there, you have to look like a Russian Oligarch's mistress on one last, pre-deportation spree. Actually, that sounds like quite a good look, doesn't it...Oh anyway....
It could be worse for cool-looking Kate. Because this is my blog, indulge me in a bit of comparison here. If I go shopping on the Upper East Side without lashing myself up to the very nines, I don't get the cold shoulder. I get the pitying, cold shoulder. Far worse than mere mean-ness. I would rather the hard-faced-seen-it-all-dominellas and driven-deranged-by-selling-doxies cold shouldered me than took me on and tried to 'help' me. 'Do you like denim?' said one assistant during a meander over there before Christmas. Pardon? 'Have you ever tried a cargo pant?' said another, in a different shop. Such comments make me laugh out loud, prompting the poor-old sales birds to write me off as insane. I wouldn't advise anyone to set foot inside DKNY on Madison Ave by the way, the shopbirds in there are half-human-half-vulture.
Don't cry for me though, Our Tina, this only happens on the UES. Here on the UWS I am on friendly terms with all the assistants, from Burberry and Barneys Co-op to Zabars. Not including Staples, obviously (see previous postings 'Banned etc etc'). Also suffer no prejudice downtown and breeze in and out of stores there like a person who knows DVF (I don't).
This all leads me once more to the conclusion that the Upper East Side is barely New York. Some old-fashioned Waspy presence can still be vaguely felt but all in all, it is more like a suburb of Minsk. Sorry, Minskys. Pot-holed roads, Very Bad Smells, rats that build nests in cars (!) 1970s shop fittings, ghostly figures with cracked white faces, yellow teeth and red lips trying to sell you stuff, barely a Starbux in sight and deathly, scruffy convenience stores litter the land. Strange people, the kind that might in fact, have hovered behind Steve Strange in a Visage video roam the streets. In a Madison Ave cafe before Christmas, an old lady introduced herself to me as the 'English psychic' and reassured me that death would ultimately find me. I looked at an apartment over there once where the elevator operator had grown deformed. His right arm and shoulder, after 50 years of turning the old-fashioned elevator wheel, were massively over-developed. I feel terrible for admitting it gave me the creeps and I couldn't rent that apartment. It doesn't help that I've read a spooky book about the disused hospital on Roosevelt Island and scared myself with that Jennifer Connolly horror film, Dark Water.
Anyway, I seem to have strayed back to the subject of horror when I started on shops. That's me, unable to concentrate, ask anyone of the myriad of school teachers who tried to make me. My point is, if you come to NYC this year looking for atmosphere, check out Barneys and co but don' t linger too long or allow shopworkers to intimidate you. If they do, remember NOT to take it personally. Just laugh loudly and even maniacally if you fancy it, then skidaddle downtown where the pulse of this city still beats like a big bass drum.
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