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Thong warfare and the kidnapped beauty queen
The New York Times doesn know it yet, but it has a chief Venezuelan fashion correspondent. And I it. Models strut down the runway under an enormous white tent and wave to their sugar daddies. I not anyone sugar daddy, but I wave back anyway. Through the sashaying legs I intermittently see a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ricardo Montalban. He has a blond on each side of him rib removed, collagen boosted silicone beauties. They wrap their pneumatic lips around fluorescent straws for hits of Bellini between jealous stares at the newer flesh up on the runway. The models come out one at a time in pink thongs, leopard print thongs,van cleef fake alhambra necklace, jeweled thongs. Each thong draws a big cheer from the crowd until a bigger cheer is drawn by the next. Thong warfare.
This is the best assignment in the world, and I suppose I have Alex Deep to thank. His family owns the Casablanca Fashion Group, a chain of high end fashion boutiques where affluent Venezuelans can get the latest from Dolce Gabbana, Armani and Versace all under one roof. They produce this show annually to publicize the spring lines.
Deep wears a retro tailored Armani suit, steel chains around his neck and at least two tones of red streaked through his hair,van cleef and arpels replica necklace, swept up in the style of a David Beckham mohawk. The final accessory is an admiring coterie of Venezuelan princesses. Alex Deep wants to be a music producer. He has a recording studio in Miami and spins at Boston nightclubs. A drunken Mexican introduced us to each other at the Manhattan nightspot Hiro, where Deep appeared to have fallen into a vat of Dolce Gabbana. A week later, he offered to fly me to Venezuela if I would write a piece about this show. He mentioned that his family was looking to expand their fashion business to the United States, and I imagine that they wanted publicity.
Of course, I don know anything about fashion and did not pretend to. But I had followed Hugo Chavez socialist coup of this country and even found amusement in his more colorful rhetoric. If Paris was well worth a mass, post capitalist Caracas is certainly worth a fashion show.
I picked up a few back issues of Vogue and flew down.
Soon we are driving around the city in Deep armored Jeep Grand Cherokee. The Deep Jeep is a unique automobile. It has a panic button to kill the engine and signal a satellite in the event of a kidnapping, inch thick windows to stop bullets in the event of a shooting, and a hefty driver trained to speed like a madman if necessary.
We are headed into the mountains for a birthday party. In Latin America the upper classes say that bodyguards are like testicles big, hairy and always outside when the party happens. Alas, it funny because it true. Outside the house is a black suited phalanx of armed men, big and grisly with indigenous features. The SUVs form a row of bulletproof chrome beneath a 10,000 volt wire of death suspended above the 9 foot fence surrounding the estate. Outside is the city, and outside it will stay.
Caracas is a city built into the jungle, but everyone I meet here looks perfectly European. Silken hair, porcelain skin, small nose. The young women spend a great deal of time, and surely money, achieving what is often described as an impossible body standard. One wears a lavender sweater so commensurately tight with her own body that you can see the outline of every abdominal muscle in her six pack. The young men could have walked out of the Upper East Side or a European capital.
Alex Deep hands me another bottle of Polar beer, which the birthday girl family has made several billion dollars manufacturing, and explains: is the top 2 percent of the country, what you are seeing. We have no middle class.
But they have a lower class. Squalid adobe towns flicker across the mountains on the other sides of the city. Each house does its best with a single light bulb while the teakwood pillbox shines, bright and cheery, an electrocution prone pleasure dome.
Early on, Chavez sacked the entrenched management of Petroleos de Venezuela, the state owned oil corporation, replacing it with his own supporters. It makes even more sense when you account for the persistent global energy panic; the cost of oil skyrocketed past $50 a barrel last year because of China insatiable appetite for crude and threats to oil fields in the Middle East (namely, Iraq). To a socialist leader in an oil rich country the arithmetic is easy. Why not share the wealth?
Critics, though, charge that Chavez implemented his programs to buy quick support from the masses at the cost of the large scale capital reinvestment, which experts say the state oil industry needs if it is to continue producing the low quality jungle oil that is this state lifeblood. Analysts estimate that Petroleos de Venezuela requires $6 billion of reinvestment each year to remain competitive, and under Chavez in 2004, it received less than half that amount. The fear is that Chavez is acting recklessly to bolster his own power and that oil prices may fall, triggering an economic crisis. For the time being, Chavez educational programs and subsidies have improved the quality of life for some poor Venezuelans, though the basic fabric of society remains unchanged.
In this crowd, the very mention of his name brings sour looks and rumors: Chavez has a private collection of Rolex watches and Armani suits that he wears to the same types of debauched parties that he once railed against. More: His sons have trust funds filled with the people money and spend their days as bourgeois wastrels in Florida. Still more: His lieutenants fill entire sections of Miami with million dollar mansions similarly paid for by the single light bulb adobes off in the distance. With power firmly consolidated, Chavez holds all the cards.
One man insists to me that a little over 10 percent of the country leading families are represented on this single lawn. It is at first difficult to believe, but it seems more plausible after one girl invites me to her birthday party without ever learning my name.
are flying to Margarita on Sunday! she says,van cleef and arpel knock off necklace. hundred of us!
Lightning flickers over the Bantustan built into the side of a less fortunate mountain. Mud slides killed 25,000 and left 100,000 homeless in towns like this across the country in 1999, but no one outside Venezuela took much notice. No one takes much notice now.
The next morning the phone rings. It is Alex Deep. The fashion show is tomorrow and there is a press conference in the hotel lobby. I feel sorry for the press and wonder what sorts of questions they could possibly ask on the day before a fashion show. I then recall that I am the press.
I enter the lobby and soon meet Veruska Ramirez, who was Miss Venezuela in 1997. Her ochre skin is Amazonian, her pointed features European, and her unmoving breasts silicone. She is lost world, Old World, and New World. Before becoming Miss Venezuela she cleaned houses for $80 a week. Venezuelans take their beauty pageants seriously,van cleef knock off necklaces, and beauty is the only element of meritocracy that remains fully operative in this country, come junta or high water. Life is good for Ramirez, and she also recently experienced the ultimate Latin American status symbol: a kidnapping.
There is an awkward silence as I realize that she expects to be interviewed. As a fashion reporter it is my professional duty to inquire about her clothes.
are you wearing? I ask.
It comes off sounding a bit pervy, but apparently this is how it done.
Mara, she says.
Right, then. tell me about your kidnapping. And away she goes.
left me in a very dangerous zone of the city, and when I got out of the car I said, my God! Because I had my high heels on! They wanted autographs! she says. they got in the car, they said, worry, cutie! We not gonna hurt you! they recognized me!
We are now playing Latin American abduction survivor. Deep, again wearing head to toe Armani, one ups Ms. Venezuela.
brother, he had a gun in his head! They were pointing at his girlfriend! They were saying, spread this little girl! You feel bad this entire life if I rape your girl!'
Ms. Venezuela defends her honor: I told them from the beginning, prefer that you kill me than touch me.'
She then joins Mr. Venezuela and several other models on the press panel with Carlos Dorado, a tan businessman in a navy blue suit with gold pinstripes.
I am initially inclined to sit in the back row nursing my Polar beer hangover until it is all over. But I am a fashion reporter, and in less than 24 hours will be the highest ranking such reporter in this entire nation. I must ask questions about fashion; it is what I do. Soon Deep elbows me in the side. on, man. Ask a question.
The New York Times doesn know it yet, but it has a chief Venezuelan fashion correspondent. And I it. Models strut down the runway under an enormous white tent and wave to their sugar daddies. I not anyone sugar daddy, but I wave back anyway. Through the sashaying legs I intermittently see a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ricardo Montalban. He has a blond on each side of him rib removed, collagen boosted silicone beauties. They wrap their pneumatic lips around fluorescent straws for hits of Bellini between jealous stares at the newer flesh up on the runway. The models come out one at a time in pink thongs, leopard print thongs,van cleef fake alhambra necklace, jeweled thongs. Each thong draws a big cheer from the crowd until a bigger cheer is drawn by the next. Thong warfare.
This is the best assignment in the world, and I suppose I have Alex Deep to thank. His family owns the Casablanca Fashion Group, a chain of high end fashion boutiques where affluent Venezuelans can get the latest from Dolce Gabbana, Armani and Versace all under one roof. They produce this show annually to publicize the spring lines.
Deep wears a retro tailored Armani suit, steel chains around his neck and at least two tones of red streaked through his hair,van cleef and arpels replica necklace, swept up in the style of a David Beckham mohawk. The final accessory is an admiring coterie of Venezuelan princesses. Alex Deep wants to be a music producer. He has a recording studio in Miami and spins at Boston nightclubs. A drunken Mexican introduced us to each other at the Manhattan nightspot Hiro, where Deep appeared to have fallen into a vat of Dolce Gabbana. A week later, he offered to fly me to Venezuela if I would write a piece about this show. He mentioned that his family was looking to expand their fashion business to the United States, and I imagine that they wanted publicity.
Of course, I don know anything about fashion and did not pretend to. But I had followed Hugo Chavez socialist coup of this country and even found amusement in his more colorful rhetoric. If Paris was well worth a mass, post capitalist Caracas is certainly worth a fashion show.
I picked up a few back issues of Vogue and flew down.
Soon we are driving around the city in Deep armored Jeep Grand Cherokee. The Deep Jeep is a unique automobile. It has a panic button to kill the engine and signal a satellite in the event of a kidnapping, inch thick windows to stop bullets in the event of a shooting, and a hefty driver trained to speed like a madman if necessary.
We are headed into the mountains for a birthday party. In Latin America the upper classes say that bodyguards are like testicles big, hairy and always outside when the party happens. Alas, it funny because it true. Outside the house is a black suited phalanx of armed men, big and grisly with indigenous features. The SUVs form a row of bulletproof chrome beneath a 10,000 volt wire of death suspended above the 9 foot fence surrounding the estate. Outside is the city, and outside it will stay.
Caracas is a city built into the jungle, but everyone I meet here looks perfectly European. Silken hair, porcelain skin, small nose. The young women spend a great deal of time, and surely money, achieving what is often described as an impossible body standard. One wears a lavender sweater so commensurately tight with her own body that you can see the outline of every abdominal muscle in her six pack. The young men could have walked out of the Upper East Side or a European capital.
Alex Deep hands me another bottle of Polar beer, which the birthday girl family has made several billion dollars manufacturing, and explains: is the top 2 percent of the country, what you are seeing. We have no middle class.
But they have a lower class. Squalid adobe towns flicker across the mountains on the other sides of the city. Each house does its best with a single light bulb while the teakwood pillbox shines, bright and cheery, an electrocution prone pleasure dome.
Early on, Chavez sacked the entrenched management of Petroleos de Venezuela, the state owned oil corporation, replacing it with his own supporters. It makes even more sense when you account for the persistent global energy panic; the cost of oil skyrocketed past $50 a barrel last year because of China insatiable appetite for crude and threats to oil fields in the Middle East (namely, Iraq). To a socialist leader in an oil rich country the arithmetic is easy. Why not share the wealth?
Critics, though, charge that Chavez implemented his programs to buy quick support from the masses at the cost of the large scale capital reinvestment, which experts say the state oil industry needs if it is to continue producing the low quality jungle oil that is this state lifeblood. Analysts estimate that Petroleos de Venezuela requires $6 billion of reinvestment each year to remain competitive, and under Chavez in 2004, it received less than half that amount. The fear is that Chavez is acting recklessly to bolster his own power and that oil prices may fall, triggering an economic crisis. For the time being, Chavez educational programs and subsidies have improved the quality of life for some poor Venezuelans, though the basic fabric of society remains unchanged.
In this crowd, the very mention of his name brings sour looks and rumors: Chavez has a private collection of Rolex watches and Armani suits that he wears to the same types of debauched parties that he once railed against. More: His sons have trust funds filled with the people money and spend their days as bourgeois wastrels in Florida. Still more: His lieutenants fill entire sections of Miami with million dollar mansions similarly paid for by the single light bulb adobes off in the distance. With power firmly consolidated, Chavez holds all the cards.
One man insists to me that a little over 10 percent of the country leading families are represented on this single lawn. It is at first difficult to believe, but it seems more plausible after one girl invites me to her birthday party without ever learning my name.
are flying to Margarita on Sunday! she says,van cleef and arpel knock off necklace. hundred of us!
Lightning flickers over the Bantustan built into the side of a less fortunate mountain. Mud slides killed 25,000 and left 100,000 homeless in towns like this across the country in 1999, but no one outside Venezuela took much notice. No one takes much notice now.
The next morning the phone rings. It is Alex Deep. The fashion show is tomorrow and there is a press conference in the hotel lobby. I feel sorry for the press and wonder what sorts of questions they could possibly ask on the day before a fashion show. I then recall that I am the press.
I enter the lobby and soon meet Veruska Ramirez, who was Miss Venezuela in 1997. Her ochre skin is Amazonian, her pointed features European, and her unmoving breasts silicone. She is lost world, Old World, and New World. Before becoming Miss Venezuela she cleaned houses for $80 a week. Venezuelans take their beauty pageants seriously,van cleef knock off necklaces, and beauty is the only element of meritocracy that remains fully operative in this country, come junta or high water. Life is good for Ramirez, and she also recently experienced the ultimate Latin American status symbol: a kidnapping.
There is an awkward silence as I realize that she expects to be interviewed. As a fashion reporter it is my professional duty to inquire about her clothes.
are you wearing? I ask.
It comes off sounding a bit pervy, but apparently this is how it done.
Mara, she says.
Right, then. tell me about your kidnapping. And away she goes.
left me in a very dangerous zone of the city, and when I got out of the car I said, my God! Because I had my high heels on! They wanted autographs! she says. they got in the car, they said, worry, cutie! We not gonna hurt you! they recognized me!
We are now playing Latin American abduction survivor. Deep, again wearing head to toe Armani, one ups Ms. Venezuela.
brother, he had a gun in his head! They were pointing at his girlfriend! They were saying, spread this little girl! You feel bad this entire life if I rape your girl!'
Ms. Venezuela defends her honor: I told them from the beginning, prefer that you kill me than touch me.'
She then joins Mr. Venezuela and several other models on the press panel with Carlos Dorado, a tan businessman in a navy blue suit with gold pinstripes.
I am initially inclined to sit in the back row nursing my Polar beer hangover until it is all over. But I am a fashion reporter, and in less than 24 hours will be the highest ranking such reporter in this entire nation. I must ask questions about fashion; it is what I do. Soon Deep elbows me in the side. on, man. Ask a question.
The Wall