Quotable: Simon Doonan On The Beautiful People
"Like Flaubert’s antiheroine, we saw glamour and modish excitement in the faraway and only boredom and dreariness in the here and now. In Reading, our industrial hometown, there was no shortage of dreary here and now.
We fed our fantasies and illusions by reading endless drivel about the Beautiful People in my mother’s glossy magazines. These effortlessly stylish trendsetters owned sprawling palazzos in Rome and ultragroovy pied-à-terres in Chelsea. They slept in six-foot circular beds covered with black satin sheets and white Persian cats. The Beautiful People were thin and gorgeous, and they had lots and lots and lots of thick hair, and their lives seemed to be about a hundred million times more fabulous than Biddie’s life and mine combined. They did not work much, they had buckets and buckets of money, which they spent on things like champagne and caftans and trips to Morocco to buy caftans."
--Simon Doonan, Nasty: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints, soon to be republished with the much better title The Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints
