“Let’s go to Paris’s house! I want to rob!” says the blandly amoral antiheroine in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, the arty docudrama that follows the adventures of a gang of label-besotted high school students who burglarized the homes of the rich and famous (none of whom, according to the film at least, have even the most rudimentary security systems).
What these bad children steal, despite the title, in most cases isn’t really classic bling, by which we mean glittery, loud, over-the-top pieces that leave no doubt in viewers’ minds that you are out to have a good time, love being stared at, and don’t mind, at least for a little while, being deemed ridiculously silly.
A funny thing happens in summer re: these extreme accoutrements—items that can make you shrivel with shame in the colder months suddenly become innocently joyous in the warm sunshine. Was Diana Vreeland, former editor in chief of this magazine, perhaps referring to July and August when she famously averred: “We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”
With this in mind, and well aware that the fun-fest that is the Fourth of July arrives next week, you might consider donning a pair of minuscule cut-offs spied at Strawberry (in truth so abbreviated it is hard to imagine whose minuscule rump they are intended for), which are enhanced with sequined Union Jacks traveling up each hip. (If the British flag appears to send a bit of a mixed message for the Fourth, no worries—we made friends with England hundreds of years ago.) Or consider sporting Strawberry’s oversize tee, which presents two giant tigers with sequined eyes, an homage, surely, to Givenchy’s fall 2012 collection.
A slouchy black shirt with a Balmain-esque air at Forever 21, sporting a welter of faintly dangerous spikes on each shoulder, is a mere $15.80. (If you still haven’t been won over to this bling notion, the store also has a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward,” and signed “Charlotte Brontë.” Is some underemployed English lit grad student moonlighting in Forever 21’s design department?)
And lastly, at a shop on Fourteenth Street with the dubious name Secret of Treasures (where is that English student when you need him or her?) everything is a delightful $2.99. For this amount, far less than a drink on the LIRR bar-car to Montauk, you can cheer up your lobes with fuchsia hoops made of some indeterminate furry stuff, brandish peace symbols enclosed in shiny stars, or dangle feathers swinging from long chains. Wide silvery metal mesh cuffs liberally doused with chunky rhinestones will surely brighten a wrist, and why not add a pair of rainbow-hued friendship bracelets, one each for the two wonderful gay rights rulings this week courtesy of the Supremes, who really know how to celebrate the Fourth.
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