Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously good looking? ---Derek Zoolander.
It sounds like a script from the "Zoolander" movie but it is the hilariously too real report from Jason Horowitz in the very appropriate Fashion & Style section of the New York Times. Horowitz, who often sounds like he wants to ride on Hillary's lap to the White House, covers what he thinks is the oh so important subject of whether Hillary Clinton can win the support of the very very fashionable. First we find out that the very fashionable Marie Claire contributing editor Audrey Gelman no longer feels like an outcast as she did in 2008 for supporting Hillary:
They berated Ms. Gelman, then a junior staff worker on the Clinton campaign, for backing a candidate standing in the way of the first black president. At another point, the button invited mocking inquiries at a Lower East Side cafe as to whether Ms. Gelman was a Republican.
Now a 27-year-old public relations consultant with one foot in Democratic politics and the other in New York’s hipper-than-thou fashion, arts and music scene, Ms. Gelman is feeling more confident in her Clinton accessories this time around. “If you go to a party in Williamsburg or Bushwick now and wear a Hillary pin,” she said, “people are going to be like, ‘Right on.’ ”
GASP! She was accused of being a...a Republican! Oh, the horror. The absolute horror! Fortunately the Hillary political fashion now seems to be in:
“Cool Kids for Hillary.” You may be able to imagine it on a campaign button, but would any of them wear one? Whereas Mr. Obama’s 2008 candidacy organically prompted excitement on college campuses, the country’s skinny-jean citadels and celebrity hangouts, the candidate Clinton seems to be trying awfully hard to be down with the in crowd.
...Then there’s the Brooklyn Heights campaign headquarters. “Brooklyn U.S.A. How can you beat that?” Mrs. Clinton asks in a meet-the-neighbors web video — complete with a precious faux-handwriting font — that captures her greeting adoring Brooklynites. (Never mind that this is one of the borough’s more-staid neighborhoods.)
Ms. Gelman, who called the former secretary of state “a feminist icon and a cultural icon,” has sought to lift Mrs. Clinton’s cultural cred. On the day Mrs. Clinton announced her candidacy, Ms. Gelman said that approving Instagram messages poured in from the singer Ciara, the stars of the raunchy millennial comedy “Broad City” and her best friend and “Girls” creator Lena Dunham. (“My new tramp stamp,” Ms. Dunham wrote under the campaign logo.)
There have also been endorsements from Katy Perry, 50 Cent and America Ferrera, the star of TV’s “Ugly Betty.” On Thursday evening, Mrs. Clinton replied “Back at you” to the singer Kelly Clarkson, who called herself a “fan of Hillary.”
The scene now shifts from the very fashionable glitterati to one reminiscent of when Derek Zoolander slummed with the peons, namely his father and brothers, in the coal mines:
But in campaign appearances, Mrs. Clinton has targeted voters on the opposite side of the cool-kid spectrum. On Monday, she stood before leatherbound classics and a ceramic life-size dog in the Mason City, Iowa, living room of Dean Genth and his husband, Gary Swenson.
“People really got to see a personable, down-to-earth, approachable Hillary Clinton that I think a lot of people don’t realize exists,” Mr. Swenson said after the event, adding that she was “really interested in what the heartland of America and what America in general is interested in.”
The next day, Mrs. Clinton sat for a round-table discussion about small businesses inside a Cedar Falls, Iowa, bicycle shop. With the clean-cut owner of Goldie’s Ice Cream Shoppe on her right, Mrs. Clinton put on her super-folksy accent and stated, again, “I’m running for president because everyday Americans and their families need a champion.”
But enough with the common peasants in the boondocks, time to drop that super-folksy accent and go back to the cool kids:
And yet, Mrs. Clinton would love for young trendsetters to champion her cause and to replicate Mr. Obama’s success at converting his cultural currency among young voters into hard votes.
...Mrs. Clinton has made efforts to maintain contact with cultural signposts. In 2012, she posed with the singer Lia Ices at Roberta’s, the Bushwick pizzeria housed in a former garage that was all the rage. That same year, she tasted viral Internet fame and liked it.
And now we go to Washington Square Park for fashionable celeb namedrop time:
A few feet away, the actress Anne Hathaway and her husband smiled as they watched toddlers interacting with dogs. She politely declined to comment (a former boyfriend of hers who once pledged $50 million to the Clinton Global Initiative pleaded guilty to fraud in 2008) and instead admired a circle of aspiring Broadway stars shouting voice exercises.
Oops! One of those ugly Clinton scandals just reared its ugly head. Quick, think more happy thoughts with another celeb namedrop:
On a recent afternoon, in front of St. Ann’s, a private school across the street from the Clinton headquarters, Adrian Briscoe, 42, paused from chatting with the actress and Brooklyn Heights native Jennifer Connelly to discuss Mrs. Clinton’s decision to base her campaign nearby.
St. Ann's? Wasn't that the school funded by Zoolander?
