Juicy Couture Couture Couture

...like drinking grape Kool-Aid in a head shop.



I’m obsessed with Juicy Couture. Or more accurately, with the women behind Juicy Couture. Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, two self-described “wacky thrift shop girls”, started their pink-tracksuit-with-arse-script empire in 1996 and now find themselves with a multi-million dollar business.

Or as the creation myth on the Juicy Couture website has it: “Once upon a time...there were two nice girls who liked stuff. Juicy Couture swept the land and they lived happily ever after.” Have they ever.

Juicy Pamela says, “We have infused the brand with us: with love, happiness, color.” Well, that’s just precious! And so are their Marshmallow Peep-bright ads, some depicting a Breakfast Club prom gone wild at teen queen Marie Antoinette’s Versailles.

Then there’s Juicy Pamela and Juicy Gela’s flossy-to-the-max lifestyle, which I’m now an expert in, after drooling over the recent spreads in Vogue and The New York Times Magazine. Did you know that Pamela lives with her TV director husb in an art-filled Hollywood mansion once owned by Eva Gabor? And that Gela’s married to the cute bass player from Duran Duran, and has an 15th century mansion in England complete with Elizabethan furniture, croquet lawns, and peacocks. Peacocks, people! Just wandering around!

Where do I sign up for some of this?

When Gela isn’t munching on Parisian macaroons or riding her dressage horse around her 15th century grounds, she takes refuge in her dove-gray salon with her collection of Hermès gloves.

"When I'm really stressed," she explained to Vogue, "I come in here and organize my gloves, and I feel so calm.”

Now that’s therapy. Who needs a shrink when you have a collection of Hermès gloves in your dove-gray salon? Do you think the cute bass player from Duran Duran would notice if I tied Gela up in the broom closet and discretely took her place? If I lost 25 pounds, I could even fit into all her clothes!

Basically, Juicy Katie wants to be new best friends with Juicy Gela and Juicy Pamela. But there’s just one thing: I don’t want to smell like them. Those Juicy Couture perfumes hurt my eyes. They’re so bright and shrill, so desperately in need of shade. They need a dove-gray salon to organize their gloves in and chill the f out.

Sigh. I guess I’ll be waiting a little while longer for my invitation into Gela and Pamala’s Juicy world. In the meantime, you’ll find me organizing my sock drawer.

Juicy Couture is available at Amazon.com from $52 for 1 oz

Photos from US Vogue

16 comments:

  1. My suspicion is that Juicy Gela and Juicy Pamela don't wear Juicy Perfumes.

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  2. Angi, I share that suspicion! Gela and Pamela have such sophisticated tastes in their personal life, including a love of fine art and olden-days British eccentrics. They're not walking around smelling like a juicebox, sister!

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  3. If you say "Couture couture couture" enough times in a row, it sounds like an old-fashioned cash register. Or a train trying to gather enough steam to leave the station. Coincidences? I think not....

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  4. "They need a dove-gray salon to organize their gloves in and chill the f out."

    Amen, sister. But you're preachin' to the choir, here.

    And how come I didn't get married to Duran Duran's cute base player? Oh heck, I didn't even *date* Duran Duran's cute base player!

    Life is so unfair.

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  5. Well observed, Scott! And yes, nathan, life is unfair. That why we need to even the stakes with friskiness and mischief to buck ourselves up.

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  6. I read that the JC ladies recommend layering Carnal Flower with the Body Shop patchouli oil; I don't know if I would try this at home.

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  7. OK, picky, I know... but it sounds like you are saying ka-cher, ka-cher and I thought the word couture was pronounced ka-tour.
    In any case, it does not sound like a grown-up, womanly scent and my something-teen years have long since passed (taking a moment to mourn the passing - ok)so I will hold out for the "I am Woman, hear me purr" scent.(Roaring is soooo overrated) Speaking of which, I love the new kittenish bang you are sporting!

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  8. ScentsofSmell,when it comes to pronunciation, you can never be too careful, especially on YouTube where 14-year-olds from Norway are eager to correct my (non-existent) Japanese. As an American, I aim to strike a balance between correct soundings of foreign words and possibly alienating "Frenchier than thou" renderings. My guide for my Americanized "couture" pronunciation was Merriam-Webster's online audio guide, and I said it the way the dude there said it. All in preparation to write this answer, apparently!

    Cheers on the bangs - I'm enjoying them too. I thought I'd weaned myself off of them for good, but they...crept...back.

    And yes, Ka-cher Ka-cher is not womanly at in the least. And not manly, either. It's kidly.

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  9. OK, not to be (still) too nit-picky, but I just went to Webster-Merriam online just to see if in fact, it would add a 'k'sound where there is a 't' and there were two pronounciations. One was all "Frenchified" and sounded like "koo-too-errrrr" and the other was more like what I was thinking "ku-tour". But different parts of the country seem to have their own dialect, so cheers!

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  10. Yeah, my "t-u-r-s" come out "chur" - don't know if that's the Virginia in me. I don't pronounce hard "t"s in "mature" or "amateur", either.

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  11. Dear Katie and Scents of Smell: Your debate on the correct pronunciation of "couture" is giving me flashbacks of that unfortunate toilet paper incident in the Dear Abby column in the 80's, wherein the debate, over whether the end of the TP should come up over the roll toward you or back over the roll away from you, lasted for weeks, led to heated arguments by the water cooler, and ended in an exasperated draw, with Poor Abby's readers exhausted. Stop the madness, you're both right! :)

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  12. Haha, Scott, I remember that Dear Abby toilet paper donnybrook.

    It is madness, isn't it? And yes, we're both right.
    I'm fascinated by language, and the evolution of meanings and pronunciation, and the effect of accents. My husband has a Maryland accent, and he says "werter" and "Wershington" for "water" and "Washington". And the Brits ridicule American pronunciations, when in fact we're the ones speaking "correctly", as our soundings come from the Elizabethan English who came to America in the 1600s!

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  13. Katie:
    I know exactly what you mean, and perhaps I am sensitive because of my own experience. My family spoke Quebecois French and unfortunately that accent has stayed with me. When I try to speak French to Parisian's in Paris, I get that look that means "I cannot beleev zat you have butchaired ze modder tongue like zat!" and then they pretend not to have understood a word I have said. Sigh. And I have heard that the Quebecois French is actually closer to the original 17th century French than the current language spoken in Paris. But that doesn't stop me from speaking it. I kinda liked the horrified looks I get; I'm just like that.

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  14. I thought "werter" and "Wershington" was a midwest thing. I have a childhood friend from the midwest who speaks like that. Well, didn't want anyone to get their panties in a twist over this. I too have childhood trauma of parents wanting us kids to speak "correctly" so we were constantly told how to pronounce a word and to ensure we used proper grammar. So, kudos and apologies to all. I will try and be more ma-chur about it! Ha!

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  15. ScentsofSmell, you and I had the same parents in that regard.

    Scott, I feel your pain. I lived in London for many years, and felt that Brits also "pretended" not to understand me. I mean, c'mon! It's not like they didn't all grow up watching US TV shows like "Friends" and "Dallas". But I learned to say "Hole Street" for "Hall Street", otherwise taxi drivers acted like they didn't know what I was saying. And "tube" (London Underground) had to be said "chuuuuuuube" instead of "toob". Sheesh!

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