fashion dictator

Imelda Marcos has something new up her butterfly sleeve.

The former first lady of the Philippines is putting to use (don’t know if it’s good) her vast experience garnered from shopping sprees around the fashion capitals of the world with her husband’s load of public funds seized during his dictatorship.

She is launching for the common people the Imelda Collection of fashion jewelry, accessories and apparel recycled from her wardrobe. Yes. Selling the “Imelda Spirit”, as her daughter calls it. It could be toxic, I warn you. After all, this is the same woman who once declared it was her duty to inspire her poverty-stricken countrymen with ostentatious evidence of her extravagance, to be “some kind of light, a star to give them guidelines.” I guess she did it the only way a woman with her intelligence quotient knew to do: she shone, yes she did, with more trinkets, baubles, and sequins in her notorious collection of shoes than your most powerful Ray Bans can filter.

Why is she doing this? This is not about money. After all, money can only buy you food and silly things like that, but “only beauty can feed your soul and your spirit.” Sort of scary that a woman to whom perception is reality and truth is not is trying to dispense wisdom to a world where reality is based quite a bit on “food and things like that”.

Perhaps in the Marcos household, “let them eat cake” is still the answer to frivolous problems like poverty and hunger.