Kerou-Whacked: Part 2

Alternate title: “Everything Must Go: Part 4″

So I’m in Vegas with the Louise, which means shopping and eating — more shopping than eating, but the eating is stellar and doesn’t take second place by any means (Okada and Daniel Boulud on Thursday and Friday, respectively). Though how Louise can eat and still look like this is beyond my comprehension:

“Don’t hate me because I have the metabolism of a hummingbird!”

The dress she’s wearing is the black version of the houndstooth Milly sheath that Jill Biden wore on Inauguration Day. The Milly sheath was a 50% off score at Nordstrom, and the pumps are YSL Trooper Platform Pumps that were snagged for 60% off at Neiman Marcus. It’s almost mind-boggling the high quality of merchandise now being dumped into clearance bins, but thank god Louise is there to rescue it.

She’s utterly selfless that way.

Speaking of selfless, trotting out for a shopping expedition in Vegas was an eye-opening experience, sadly illustrating the present state of the economy. First of all, the overall Vegas attendance was noticeably diminished from past experiences. We hit the Caesar’s Forum and The Shoppes at the Palazzo, both of which used to be an exercise in gritting your teeth and elbowing your way through nearly solid masses of humanity, especially on a weekend, but on both Friday and Saturday we strolled easily through the shopping malls with nary a push or a shove.

It was kind of scary.

One thing I noticed was that the higher-end luxury boutiques like Chanel, Fendi, Dior, Gucci and Chloe had seemingly banded together and made the decision to ditch any slow to non-selling merchandise rather than show reduced prices on their shelves and racks — a kind of “Our glittery baubles are so desirable that we don’t have to put anything on sale, see?” bravado, even though very few people were milling about in their stores and the sales clerks looked as if they were about to pass out from the sheer tedium of doing nothing but dusting the glass shelves all day.

Louise drags the hubby through Chloe. They were the only customers in the place.

The mid-tier shops, however:

Everything Must Go! at The Shoppes at the Palazzo.

We ran into drastic price cuts at Max Mara, Catherine Malandrino, Coach, Jimmy Choo, Anya Hindmarch and various mixed-brand boutiques. Louise snagged a half-price black Kooba clutch in a huge Caesar’s Forum store full of signs blaring “Clearance!” and “50% off!” The shop’s owner rushed around to every customer who entered to announce that they were closing the store in nine days and needed to sell everything. All right, then.

But enough about the crashing economy, let’s talk Guerlain!

I’d never visited an actual free-standing Guerlain boutique, so when I saw one in The Shoppes at the Palazzo, I couldn’t resist. I pulled Louise in with me to see if she might like any of their L’Art et la Matière collection.

Behold, the gleaming glory of Guerlain!

She sniffed at Bois d’Armenie (“Nice, but boring”), Cuir Beluga (“No, not my style”) and Iris Ganache (“Pretty, but . . . “) before I surrendered to her abiding love for Chanel and stopped trying to convince her that Guerlain is a possibility. We’d stopped at a Chanel boutique the day before and she fell in love with Beige from their Les Exclusifs series (the Cuir de Russie was the one for me), and once a girl falls for Chanel, well . . .

Before we exited the Guerlain boutique, I let the sales assistant spray some Cuir Beluga on my arm so that I could test it long-term. About an hour later, as we were walking through the Venetian casino area, I was suddenly enveloped in an extremely unpleasant vanilla odor that was skewing horribly horribly wrong, and then I remembered: “Crap! Cuir Beluga has the dreaded Immortelle in it!” I sprinted for a restroom and scrubbed the foul odor off before we sat down for lunch.

But maybe it would be good to end on a nicer note, like a few photos of the Christian Louboutin store in the Palazzo. No markdowns at Louboutin, and lots of customers coming in through the door. Not sure they were selling anything, but plenty of fashion slaves were still willing to try on every spike-heeled beauty within spitting distance:

“Yes, we’re as beautiful on the outside as we are on the inside.”

I can’t be certain, but I think it’s a shrine to the candy colored shoe god.

Unfortunately, Louise can’t get a Louboutin on her foot to save her life — the fit is way too narrow. Sometimes the world is unfair.

Funny anecdote: I turned to the Louboutin sales assistant who was helping us and asked, “So, do these shoes really fit anyone, or do women just cram their feet into them and suffer the consequences in order to wear something so beautiful?” She smiled a secret, knowing little smile: “They just cram their feet into them and suffer,” she said.

I believe it.

***Note: I want to state for the record (and so that the extremely pleasant and helpful SA doesn’t get flogged by management) that the response of the sales assistant to my half-jesting question was VERY tongue-in-cheek. The assistant did ack
nowledge, however, that the Louboutin line in general is cut on the narrow side, and that Louise’s experience of not finding a single Louboutin shoe to fit was not a singular one.

UPDATE:

I almost forgot! We ducked into a store called Eltons — a men’s store that sells designer clothing that borders on the tragically L.A. Rocker idea of hip, though a decent enough portion of it was high-end and wearably trendy.

They were having a sale, Louise’s husband (Joe) needed shirts and I needed some jeans to replace the pair I’d torn when climbing into a taxi yesterday afternoon (I hate it when that happens!), so after a bit of searching, I found two pair of jeans that fit (not always an easy venture) and plunked them down by the cash register. They weren’t marked as on sale, but I figured I’d just suck it up and buy them anyway. The incredibly bored sales guy behind the cash register rang them up and gave me my total, which was the price of one pair, not two.

“I don’t know if those were on sale or not, but we just need to move all this stuff,” he explained and nodded his head in the direction of pretty much the entire store still stuffed with glitzy Fall 2008 merchandise forlornly crowding all the racks and shelves.

Score! I mean, my god, that’s a bad sign when sales clerks are willing to seriously discount merchandise that might not even be on sale, and the customer hasn’t even asked, but, I mean . . . score!