Fashion Is Fun, Rants
Hey Italian Fashion Elite: Stop Tormenting Me With Your Awesome Vacations
By Leah Chernikoff
Part of this job entails covering the fashion twitterverse. This is a thing I generally enjoy. Designers, models, PRs, and fashion personalities are more candid on Twitter and you get a better sense of their personality. They also break news over Twitter–like Coco Rocha posting her own wedding pix yesterday.
But lately this task has started to bother me. Here’s why: It’s August. In Europe, and especially in Italy, everyone goes on vacation. Everyone. For the whole month. When New Yorkers go on vacation they stay glued to their blackberries to respond to work emails. Not Italy. These people know how to go on vacation and not work. I would like to learn how to do this.
I’m not in Italy (oh, how I wish I were) and I’m not on vacation and instead I’m watching Italy’s fashion elite tweet pic their glorious vacations and it makes my windowless office seem way more depressing. I swear Stefano Gabbana and Anna Dello Russo and Giovanna Battaglia are in on some stealth plan to out-vacation one another on Twitter and they’re bringing me down with them.
If Stefano Gabbana tweets pics of one more beautiful Italian sunset over the water I’m going to crawl under my desk. I’ll make sure Lauren alerts you when it happens.
And now it seems Katie Grand (or someone at LOVE) is on safari (today’s tweet pics include “Hello zebra,” “Hello ostrich,” and “Hello elephants.” Le sigh.
So if you hadn’t already noticed how awesome ADR, Stefano Gabbana and Giovanna Battaglia’s vacations are going, here are some pix to rub it in. The last one’s a little treat from Stefano.
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Ok, say you are some celebrity and you’re on a glorious vacation. Why are you tweeting about it, especially if you are a popular tweeter and have thousands of fans? I think the “hello wild animal” tweets finally made me wonder this…if you keep tweeting over and over about all the wonderful stuff you’re doing/seeing, when does it stop being telling your friends about your vacation and OH LOOK AT ME ON MY VERY SPECIAL ADVENTURE.
(sorry, had the vacation that I was supposed to be going on tomorrow canceled out from under me :/ )
yes its hard to see this! everyone has some sort of vacation home or friends to sail the islands with. but i am on an airplane currently (i know, like rashy’s mag cover stated, i am addicted) and headed to be herded by six hairy beasts (five aussies and a golden retriever) and a green chicken in the desert right now. i will take that.
sorry to hear that! oh no! yeah we do all need to put our blackberrys down from time to time. the one day i ventured to prospect park and walked around, every single person on their picnic blankets were looking down and were holding a black square object that they pecked away at intensely
http://amazing-fashion.com
think i am one of the few italian still working-blackberrying-tweeting around the city..
no vacation this year.so sad!
Time magazine covered a lit bit of that 7 years ago: http://www.time.com/time/columnist/elliott/article/0,9565,466081,00.html
Personally, the main difference is that Europeans work to live while (northern) Americans live to work. The same rule may be applied to food. For instance, Milanese men are very slim cause they eat in order to live … not the other way around.
The marketing is working,and you didn’t even complain about taking the bait.
The American work ethic is insane. And then you have people wondering why prescription drugs and ADD medication are used in abundance over there. Living in NY for a year was possibly my most exhilarating but simultaneously the most damaging to my health. I often felt like standing on my desk and screaming ‘CALM DOWN’ at my co-workers. My mum, a native New Yorker who moved to London to marry my father is a firsthand example of how a European lifestyle is far more beneficial for quality of life.
for some reason it looks to me like she’s sitting on a pile of sausages caught in fish netting. free the sausage!
How does tweeting every scenic moment of your holiday (which if it a proper hols will be each and every one of them) correlate with not being glued to their blackberries? I’d say spending ones entire trip trying to think up, and then post, the best way to broadcast that my trip is better than yours is hard work. You know the perfect ‘make them all jealous’ tweet doesn’t just happen.
Pretty pictures are a good way to rub it in others’ faces but I’d rather use video…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJXtCsaWLaE
The Europeans have it right. I just moved back to Canada after living for 12 years in London and Paris, and I am disgusted at the state of holidays here. You need 3 weeks to relax properly, which means everyone needs at least 4 weeks holiday a year, 3 weeks in a row in the summer, and a further week at Christmas or to take another time. Ideally you have 6.
When I worked as a designer at Sonia Rykiel, we all took the whole month of August off, and even though it was panic in September to get ready for the collections, we managed it as we were ready to work hard because we were rested.
Not sure if it is the work ethic – often the fear that if you take time off without checking in all the time that there may be someone new sitting at your desk when your holiday is over…