, we only do about $70.”But he wasn’t complaining. Good thing, lest fashion mavens retaliate and start”]
splitting salads in thirds! He said the business has been fantastic this past week and that the fashion flamingoes tip pretty well, even if they only eat like sparrows.
Fashion Week’s best-selling combo at P.J. Clarke’s, according to one server we interviewed: the tomato cream soup, spinach salad and a diet coke, of course. Indeed, we spotted at least six tables ordering the combo one busy afternoon!
On the crowded Virgin America route of L.A. to JFK, one flight attendant said he always knows when fashion week has come around because they usually run out of seltzer and orange juice on the flight. “The models and fashion week people only want a splash of something sweet in their seltzer,” he said. “Nothing too sugary.”
To be sure, the public is increasingly fascinated by what celebrities and models eat. Wednesday’s New York Times article by Jeff Gordinier chronicled the public’s more recent fixation with celebrity eating, and how the trend has shifted to starlets telling us not about what they don’t eat, but how much they do eat! And, we love to hear it. There’s even a new acronym to describe this fascination: DIPE. Coined by longtime film publicist, Jeremy Walker, DIPE stands for: Documented Instance of Public Eating.
The message: The fashion/celeb clan can wolf down a bucket of wings, or binge eat a pepperoni pizza in bed just like the rest of us. I’m reminded of that old Pantene shampoo commercial, where a barefaced, straggly hair model would say right before her on-screen transformation: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful; in the morning I look just like you.” Phew.
Gordinier’s article also addressed a pressing question I ask my husband nearly every month when he
receives his Esquire magazine: Why are the interviewers always fixated on the food that their female models/celeb subjects eat. This month’s issue with Brooklyn Decker, (model and wife to tennis star Andy Roddick), took it to an entirely new level. The several-page article was devoted solely to Decker’s preparation of the one meal that she said she knew how to make well (chicken something). Funny enough, she repeatedly tells the writer that she’s not even sure why she is being interviewed because she hasn’t done anything interesting enough to have something to say. We're not so sure that making a chicken dish upped her "interesting quotient" by many points.But the funniest quote in the article came from former Hollywood publicist-turned writer Bumble Ward who said: “Don’t you feel awfully sorry for actresses? They’re so sure that people assume they have an eating disorder that they’re forced to wolf down caveman-like proportions of comfort food in order to appear normal…And worse they have to comment on how much they are enjoying themselves. Gone are the days of the black coffee and 10 Marlboro Reds lunch.”
Not so fast. We’re not so sure those days are gone yet. Perhaps in Hollywood, but at this New York Fashion Week, it still seemed to be a favored combo of the models whom we saw popping out the backdoors of the shows with a coffee or diet coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Scratch that, it was probably a cigarette and one of the new Diet Pepsi Skinny cans that debuted (to some controversy) during Fashion Week. Now, if you don’t mind, we’re going to chow down on the Cadillac burger — but we’ll split it in thirds, of course!
