Anna Wintour, the editor of US Vogue, has announced she cannot "in good conscience" stay at Le Meurice Hotel during Paris Fashion Week and will sleep elsewhere; exactly where is unreported, but I am placing a bet on Le Bourget Airport Hotel. Her announcement does not come in a misfiled TripAdvisor review, in which she dismisses Le Meurice's beds as "too golden", or the hotel as "criminal avarice" at €5,800 a night for something called a "prestige suite". Instead we have a principled stance, perhaps the first US Vogue has mounted, against the Dorchester hotel group.
This group runs many lovely hotels and is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, who wants to establish sharia law in his kingdom and stone gay people to death. This does not sit well in some circles, and because fashion is full of followers, the fashionable – including Gucci and Richard Branson – are following Wintour to Le Bourget. When Branson screams immorality, one has to worry. How far will they all get on this shared journey? A good conscience can take one to strange places. Perhaps they will pop up on a Disney cruise with Daffy Duck.
The boycott (they are calling it a boycott) takes place when two just as lovely Paris hotels – Hôtel de Crillon and the Ritz – are shut for modification of their golden beds, etcetera, so the damp pillows of Le Bourget Airport Hotel therefore loom for fashionable heads. This is something of an earthquake. Fashion, it seems, has finally embraced progressive politics in the only way it can conceive of. Do not judge: they are busy. (Chanel, alone, presents six collections a year, including cruise wear.) Will it change the sultan's mind, or will this have the same impact as not riding your bicycle past your teenage lover's house any more?
Go stay at the Ritz, you clearly have no problem with that being owned by a beheading billionaire Saudi prince.
Oh, les bourgeois!
Fuck them and their fatuous fashionable cherry-picked posturing.
PS Some pesky facts about Brunei and western hypocrisy.
Fuck them and their fatuous fashionable cherry-picked posturing.
PS Some pesky facts about Brunei and western hypocrisy.
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