Cheap chic

Returning home from a trip to my local bookstore empty-handed--they were sold out of "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster," the book I was looking for--I was greeted by a mailbox delightfully full of alternative reading material: a new issue of the New Yorker, a postcard from a friend overseas, a few bills and the Ikea 2008 catalogue.

Deciding to set aside the reality of bills to pay, the friend I had neglected to keep in touch with and the stack of New Yorkers I was already behind on reading, I soon found myself flipping through page after page of Ikea's affordable escapism. I contemplated buying a new couch (a circular conversation with myself that starts with "I do need a new one," followed by "it is an investment piece," then "but it is on the expensive side for Ikea" and back to "I do need a new one"). I thought about "hacking" a few tables into a shelf. And then came upon a page promoting a new luxury line from Ikea: Ikea Stockholm.

Now, the concept of going high-low makes sense to me. The now-ubiquitous collaborations between big-name designers and mass market retailers, like, most recently, Roberto Cavalli for H&M, Jovovich-Hawk for Target and Vera Wang for Kohl's, are essentially a case of high-end design for low-end prices, and I'm all for budget-priced Cavalli and company. But low-high, as it were? Is it a case of low-end design for high-end prices? Or just a basic brand pushing the price tag, albeit with plush this and plump that? The appeal of luxe lines for main street shops, such as Forever 21's new Twelve by Twelve "couture" (their word) line, alludes me.

Sure, luxury might have lost its luster (which I'm sure I would know much more about once I get my hands on a copy of the book!), but lustrous low-end? Really. There's nothing more de-luxe than that.

Gray matters

Standing in the checkout line at H&M the other day, I couldn't help but notice a girl with an armload of clothes stacked from her outstretched arms right up to her fashionably long bangs. "That's a lot of gray," said the shopgirl to the bangs girl when it was her turn to pay. Without skipping a beat, Bangs Girl replied, "Yeah. Gray is the new black, you know." My first reaction was to shudder at what she said--the trite phrase, the earnest tone--but then my attention was drawn the clothes piled on the counter. They looked more like a black or even a faded black in color than the gray she was so keen on.

It reminded me of the issue I had with my new Kate Spade pumps. In the store, I was drawn to the gleaming gray patent and was thrilled to add gray footwear to my shoe collection. But when I opened the box at home, I was so sure that the shoes I brought home were brown, not gray, that I triple-checked the box label ("color: gray," it said) and then looked online to make sure it didn't come in brown (it doesn't).

After some subsequent research, I learned that gray extends much further than the charcoal and heather shades that I know. All those hyphen-gray and -ish-gray terms that are thrown around colloquially, like purple-ish gray, blue-gray, reddish gray, are all fully grays. Heck, even taupe is classified as gray. Taupe!

A gray area of color, that's for sure.