Tales of Love, Sex & Pantyhose

Will you think less of me if I tell you that I considered Candace Bushnell a prophetic guide, akin to what the oracle at Delphi was to the ancients, or the September Back-to-School issue of Seventeen was to me as a seventh-grader? You will think less of me, but it’s true.“Sex and the City,” Bushnell’s first novel, based on her columns for the New York Observer, was released the year I moved to New York as a 21-year-old about to start my first job. In it, Bushnell described a world I was just getting to know; she even wrote about my apartment building, which was around the corner from Elite modeling agency and full of two-bedroom apartments housing six aspiring models at a time. As a 5-foot-tall editorial assistant, living among the supermodels of tomorrow wasn’t easy, but “Sex and the City” offered hope. Bushnell wrote about a New York that could be hard to take, but full of opportunity.If she knew about my building, I reasoned, she must be right about everything else, too. Ten years in the future, when I was almost the same age as the main characters in “Sex and the City,” my life would be full of exciting jobs, gay best friends, and brunches with girlfriends who would share in my successes and soothe my pain. New York might be expensive and shallow and dirty at times, and all the attractive men in the city would only want to date the models who surrounded me, but it would also be full of excitement and adventure and hope, and one day, if I was lucky, I might meet a man who appreciated me as much as my girlfriends and gay best friends did.I’ve now lived in New York for nine years, and the life Bushnell predicted in “Sex and the City” did indeed come to pass, minus the expensive shoes and torrid one-night stands. I have supportive friends, my own apartment, and a career that doesn’t involve answering someone else’s phone. But if what awaits me next is the lifestyle described in “Lipstick Jungle,” I need to start looking for an escape hatch, pronto.Wendy, Nico, and Victory, the three best friends in “Lipstick Jungle,” are in their early 40s, and have achieved the successes – and in two cases, acquired the husbands – of which the thirty-something “Sex and the City” girls dreamed. But having met their goals, they are devoid of the hope that made the fashion plates of “Sex and the City” into characters that mere mortals could sympathize with, root for, and understand. This trio is, at best, self-important, tossing their subtle reddish hair (“the color of not-quite-ripe strawberries” in one case, and the shade of “a golden-reddish mink jacket” in another) and musing things like, “She was, she thought wryly, either a hero or a fool.”At worst, they’re bitter, and understandably so – every man in this book is either a plaything with a poor vocabulary, a stuffed shirt with the personality of a lobotomized game show host, or a malicious adversary. Even male children are not immune from the evil that seems to be endemic to their sex – Wendy’s six-year-old son actually punches her. (One of the three graces eventually does find love with a nice-seeming man, but he has been transformed by undergoing traditionally feminine trials, such as getting dumped and having Japanese hair-straightening treatments.) With men like these around, it’s not surprising that Nico (no, it’s never explained why she has an Italian man’s name) thinks, this time un-wryly, “The new power babe wanted to be around other powerful women. They wanted women to be ruling the world, not men.”A third of the way through “Lipstick Jungle,” I realized that I would find no inspiration here, that if I listened to Candace, the future was bleak. I couldn’t relate to the main characters, and I wanted to leave the world they lived in. I decided to keep reading because I was enjoying the fashion-porn aspect – wondering which clothing designer Victory was modeled on, which Conde Nast editor Nico, who was once unceremoniously fired from “Ratz Neste,” might be. Then came the pantyhose, and I was thrown into an even deeper depression.On page 74, Nico cheats on her husband with Kirby, a male model who – in the course of foreplay – rips off her pantyhose. Nico is the editor in chief of a fashion magazine. I’ve worked for three editors in chiefs, and met dozens more. And not one of them was ever, in my memory, wearing pantyhose. Ivory crochet tights similar to the Balenciagas on sale for fall? Sure. But pantyhose? Never! Not even in winter could I imagine a fashion editor pulling on a pair of the binding, unflattering, sandal-footed anachronism – that’s why the good Lord invented taxis, pantsuits, and patterned stockings.Now, Candace Bushnell is a fashion expert who was running to charity galas in stilettos when I was clomping from class to class in Urban Outfitters’ clogs, thinking that Manolo Blahnik was the Polish anthropologist who wrote “The Sexual Life of Savages.” She knows a lot more about fashion than I do. So what did she mean to signal to the reader by making Nico wear pantyhose? Was it symbolic? Had Nico worn them knowing they’d be ripped off, to channel the sexual freedom of the 1970s, when pantyhose were in their heyday? Or are pantyhose stylish again, and no one told me? And if they’re back in fashion, why, for the love of God, why? These were metaphysical questions, impossible to answer and really quite troubling.The oracle at Delphi deliberately made cryptic predictions; supplicants had to be smart enough to interpret correctly or they’d face dire, sometimes fatal consequences. Similarly, I fear I cannot understand the lessons meant to be imparted by “Lipstick Jungle.” Do my friends and I have to leave New York to find decent, kind partners? Or should I buy myself a pair of pantyhose, rent myself a boy toy, and concentrate on my career for the next ten years, so that when I’m 40 I’ll join Victory, Nico, and Wendy as one of the new Power Babes? Perhaps it’s too much to ask that a novel reflect real life, entertain, inspire, and predict the future of fashion. But after reading “Lipstick Jungle,” I’m left with so many questions. If “Sex and the City” were a song, it would be the theme of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” that other ode to urban singledom which promised, “love is all around.” “Lipstick Jungle” also calls to mind a song. In the words of Peggy Lee’s lament, “Is that all there is?”Ms. Gage last wrote for these pages on Crown Prince Alexander II of Serbia.

Tales of Love, Sex & Pantyhose

Tales of Love, Sex & Pantyhose

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