Fridays roll around so quickly, don't they? Foto time!
This week, a montage of Las Vegas images that capture some of the city's heart, which is to say, retailing! Yes, besides being a gaming, dining and entertainment destination, Vegas means shopping. The relatively new Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace is an extravagant mall done up in that lovely understated Vegas way that we've all come to love. The Shops themselves are that wonderful, bizarre eclectic mix that announce one very important message to the observant shopper: "we are merchandise agnostic; we have no prejudices or preferences; merchants are welcome to offer you anything they choose, and we will accommodate them." Often, this makes for strange bedfellows. Case in point:
These two shots (misaligned due to my inability to get TypePad to communicate with humans in terms other than HTML) show the exteriors of two stores sitting cheek-by-jowl. One, Anne Fontaine, a kind of object lesson in fallen elegance, is a fussy little store, all frills and crisp white blouses.
That impossible to decipher signage on the right is the logo for Chrome Hearts, a real retail oddity. Here's their website. Pretty exciting, isn't it? Lists the addresses of their eight stores and nothing else. When you enter this store, you look around and start to get it...it's a Goth store. All metal and leather, with shiny stuff sitting in dark wood display cases...nothing you can touch, everything behind glass. But expensive, you can tell that. We walked around, alternately agog and giggling as we watched obviously well-to-do browsers try on skull jewelry, Gothic iron crosses, Rolling Stones paraphenalia, and tony leather hats, like this one:
Yes, that lovingly crafted beauty does say, "Fuck" in classic Gothic lettering. Over $500. Now, think for a minute: "who is the person who buys a $500 hat with the word 'Fuck' sewn on it in Gothic lettering?" Take a minute.
Seems to me you need to be riding a pretty complex identity wagon to pop this baby on your head as you leave the house some Saturday night. Kind of: "I'm simultaneously materially obsessed and culturally iconoclastic. Watch out for me, I'm liable to run you down in my Bentley with 'Crazy Train' blarin' from the old Alpine sound system." My kind of gal!
Anyway, of course this store would want a Vegas location, because there's no place else in America where a stockbroker and his wife could go to walk on this particular wild side with quite as much comfort.
Oh, and one more thing. Nobody knows "customer service," like these folks. Notice the fine print at the bottom that says, "Call For Free Pick-Up!" That's service!
Tags: Chrome Hearts Las Vegas
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