Mind the income gap while getting off reality train

It was at first as fun as eating cake.

I was enjoying a YouTube recording of a playful Chanel runway show set in a spoof supermarket during the recent Paris Fashion Week.

This was nothing like one of my regular supermarkets, Sheng Siong.

Models strode along aisles where the French fashion house created more than 500 different labels and displayed more than 100,000 tongue-in-cheek items like Chanel-branded pasta, Coco beer bottles and detergents.

But the label's designer Karl Lagerfeld then said something that made me think the show inadvertently tugged at a tense thread in the fabric of today's society: the super-rich slumming it for kicks in the face of the increasing income gap.

He said that buying Chanel clothes did not mean "you are not allowed in the supermarket". True. "The last time, we did the art gallery - the supermarket for the super-rich," Mr Lagerfeld said of the setting for the brand's show last year. Then referring to the show last week, he added: "And this is a rich supermarket for everybody, the rich included."

Contrasty concepts are not alien to fashion presentations and photo spreads. Models with perfect haute couture gowns billowing against stained, peeling ghetto walls can be a beautiful visual. So I don't think there is a deliberate thumbing of noses at less wealthy people shopping in real supermarkets.

But these are sensitive times with major economies still slowly recovering, and Singapore recently getting the "world's most expensive city" tag, getting outraged by it, downplaying it and then getting outraged by the downplaying of it.

Some living and playing costs are going up for expats and locals, the rich and not-so-rich. The Wall Street Journal reports that the price of a quilted Chanel bag has on average risen by 70 per cent to US$4,900 (S$6,200) in the past five years.

I would like to report that the chee cheong fun from my usual stall went up from 90 cents to $1 recently. (The auntie sighed, haiyah, the stall rent and the prices of the ingredients rose, lah.)

Trimming my hair now costs me $12 instead of $10 if I want to avoid the long queues of a rival economical-haircut chain.

So, sensitised by these concerns, watching the fashion show went from frou-frou fun to seeing overtones of supermarket-shopping being so far out of the super-rich's orbit that the aisles transform into the exotic for them.

In my cake-fuelled mind, the supermarket scene in the Grand Palais, where the brand hosted the show, segued into a cinematic one portraying a mob furious over a huge income-gap problem.

There is a historical background to my imaginary scene. Back in the 1780s, another income-gap problem had been brewing for real as the French queen Marie Antoinette spent a fortune creating a faux-rustic place at her chateau Petit Trianon on the Versailles Palace grounds.

From the outside, the retreat appeared to be an exotic hamlet of tumbledown cottages, so she could indulge in the fantasy of living a peasant's life. But the interiors were opulent with comfortable couches, stoves and billiard tables. Slumming it royal-style while crushing taxes took their toll on the people.

A failed harvest made the price of grain skyrocket and mobs rioted in the streets of Paris and demanded cheap bread.

Going back in my imagined scene in the Grand Palais, a clueless, wealthy character said: "No plain bread? Let them eat brioche or a Fendi baguette." ("Let them eat cake" is commonly misattributed to Marie Antoinette, who - popularly blamed for draining France of money - was found guilty of treason and had her head chopped off for real.)

The imaginary mob demanded an execution by guillotine. A French sort of revolution. Off with the super-rich people's designer threads and heads.

Taking a deep breath now... I may need to consume less sugar.

Some of the super-rich may need to consume their wealth less conspicuously or, at least, in a less patronising manner.

Like not cooing "poor thing!" to people with smaller homes (someone once said that sincerely to me) or oohing excessively over the "exotic" experience of taking a public bus or an MRT train.

People who mean well do sometimes blurt out awful things. These sentiments are admittedly sweeter cousins to a sour sneer like the British expat Anton Casey's "stench of public transport" one.

Flaunting wealth like some do on the Tumblr blog Rich Kids Of Instagram - which is a compilation of photos taken from Instagram feeds of the well-off, and features stuff like cars and champagne parties - may already push some people's buttons to make them feel the perceived unfairness of life keenly.

And when the well-heeled play at living the "simple life" - it is the icing on top of the already too-rich cake.

So, dear rich fun-slummers, hope you enjoyed your short trip on the reality train.

Mind the income gap - and your gab - on the way out.

Mind your head too.

denise@sph.com.sg

Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.