The Visa Diaries

I don’t know about you folks, but I have an iPhone. I’m guessing a good number of you do too – Apple didn’t recently beat out Microsoft in market cap for its computers (crazy as that is, and not that the computers aren’t great), ok?? Looove the iPhone.

However, if you don’t have an iPhone, this is not some kind of insider, iPhone-crazy post designed to make you feel bad. Because the iPhone has an weak spot, as I have discovered, and its name is Liquid.

my third iPhone

I first had an iPhone 3g. It served me wonderfully, and I loved it dearly, until about 2 months ago when I went to get Mongolian barbecue for lunch. Looove the Mongolian barbecue. I eat it regularly, as its one of the few good lunch options near my work. However, on this particular day, I must have been making a call, must have picked up my Mongolian barbecue, and tossed the phone into the smiley-faced lunch bag when I was done… Well, when I removed the phone back at my desk, my own face was not so smiley. iPhone did not seem to be working properly. Sure, Mongolian BBQ juice had goozled onto it a bit, but hey, like, what’s the big deal?

Turns out it is a BIG deal. When Mr. Genius at the iPhone bar the next day opened up the phone, he drew for me with his finger the outline of the Mongolian BBQ juice inside the phone… Big goozle. iPhone no work-y. Darn.

Luckily however, I was due for an upgrade. It still cost me $200, but I walked away with a brand new iPhone 3gs. Happy-ish camper.

Until the other weekend. It has been incredibly hot on the East Coast for the past several weeks, and Saturday afternoon there was a glorious downpour. I happened to be caught out in it on my bike and was thinking, oh how wonderful, oh how glorious, the big, deep, raging summer rain. I peddled fast through the drops till I got home. And when I got home… big deep summer drops had permeated my purse, and apparently, permeated my new iPhone. This time my reaction was a lot more than “darn.” Two iPhones in two months is a bit much.

Let me just stop here and say that if this ever happens to you, drop that baby in a bag of rice as fast as you can say “Uncle Ben.” Apparently the rice helps dry it out. I didn’t know that, so I just propped it up, hoping the rain would drip out of it. No such luck. Over the next day it progressed from dying to dead.

I took it to the Genius Bar again. I got a very nice genius, at the VERY crowded Fifth Avenue store (I think the Apple store must be one of New York’s biggest tourist destinations.) I told him what had happened, and he said, “You know that liquid voids the warranty?” I had suspected as much. He peered into its orifices with a bright light. He tried to restart it with mega-voltages. It remained in the next world. He peered into its orifices with the bright light again, and then looked at me furtively. Apparently the iPhone has built in liquid detectors – two of them. On my phone, one was tripped and the other one wasn’t. Company policy he told me, is that if one is tripped, they ask the customer, “has this phone gotten wet?” If the customer says yes, warranty is voided. If the customer says no, it is covered by warranty. He kindly suggested I take that info with me, and make another appointment, at another Genius Bar. I skedaddled away, carefully holding my phone upright, lest the water drip around inside and trip the second sensor.

Next morning, I had an appointment at the Soho Genius Bar, bright and early. I got a kindly looking genius, and was somewhat encouraged that perhaps he’d “work with me”. He took the phone into the back for what seemed a very long time. Finally when he reappeared, he said, “This phone has been wet.” No ifs, ands or buts. No one-sensor-has-been-wet-but-the-other-hasn’t. I tried to prompt him. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Is that really the case, that if one sensor is wet, the warranty is voided?” He wasn’t budging. I could try AT&T he told me. I could make another appointment with another Genius, he told me. But he wasn’t budging. I left disheartened, cradling my dead phone.

One way or another, I needed a working phone. After trying AT&T, who fobbed me off on the Cellphone Exchange re-sellers down the street, where sketchy guys were selling “extra” Blackberries and iPhones, and they wanted $345 for a used iPhone anyway, I realized that Apple’s $200 replacement fee was the best deal I was going to get.

I made another appointment at the Genius Bar, back at Fifth Ave again. When I got there after work, it was crowded again. “We’re running 20 minutes late,” the greeter told me. I sat down dejected and nervous, carrying my dead phone, feeling tired of this whole pursuit of a free replacement. Half an hour went by, and I tried to distract myself, unsure of my communications strategy should be. To maintain the pretense that it hadn’t gotten wet, it had just dies, I reasoned I should act clueless as to what the problem could be, indignant that this new phone had broken, and confident that they they would replace it. However, I finally got called by a very no-nonsense-looking female Genius. “Oh great,” I thought, “She’s never going to give me a break.” All of my will for this issue gone, I communicated the my phone had stopped working in as nervous and guilty a tone as could be.

But she was busy. She didn’t even ask me what happened. She peered quickly in the phone’s orifices. Then she did something amazing: she walked to a drawer, pulled out a replacement phone box, opened it, scanned it, replaced my SIM card, printed out some paperwork, and handed me a new phone. “Your phone got wet,” she said. “I’m giving you a replacement one for free today. Be very careful with it – these phones are very sensitive to water.”

I don’t know why she did it – maybe just to get me out of there? – but I was grateful. And I am now going to travel with a ziplock baggie for my iPhone.

Some little voice inside is telling me that I shouldn’t write about my knickers on a public blog. You know, one that grandmothers and bosses might see. With apologies, however, I am going to go ahead and ignore that voice, and if you are a boss or a potential employeer, or a grandmother, or anybody else who doesn’t want to know about my knickers, please just skip this post. It won’t actually be very titillating anyway.

The reason I am ignoring that sensible voice in my head is because I have recently become OBSESSED by MYLA. And anyway, I would be remiss in the serious research purpose of this blog if I ignored a purchase category as charged with emotion and politics and women’s underwear. I mean, from corsets and crinolines to wonderbras and thongs, ladies’ smalls are a barometer of changing times and the delicate balance of sexual politics.

As I am sure you know, Myla is one of the new generation of fun, sexy, and beautifully made –if un peu cher – lingerie brands. In my awareness, the trend started with Agent Provocateur, but I could be wrong about that. These lines are different from the La Perlas of the world because they are younger and more attitudinal. Whereas La Perla is for a Stepford Wife sort of perfectly preserved Brentwood housewife, Agent P et al is lingerie for a generation of woman who grew up taking feminism’s victories for granted. Its for the PRs and stylists of this world, independent, self-possessed and self-promotional, for whom sexuality is one more tool she can use to claw her way to the top of the A-list. Not that that’s me of course (just want to make that clear for all the bosses and grandmothers who are still reading!), but that is the brand fantasy they are projecting.

Anyway, I much prefer Myla to Agent P., which is in fact only saved from being complete ho-wear by the multi-hundred dollar price tag. Myla is somehow more wholesome, the girl next door, but with a sly glint in her eye – Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon, for example. Much more subversive.

Sadly, much of these theories about the relative merits of various high-end knicker brands was purely academic, as I am not usually in the market for undergarments that cost a sizeable portion of the montly rent. What brought on this Myla love was an amazing, gift-from-above *sale*! And also a break-up. But God bless clearance sales. Right around the corner from where I was living in Notting Hill, the lovely people at the Myla store decided to open up their backroom, stock it with racks and racks of their delectable little nothings, and drop drop drop their prices lower than a J. Lo neckline. Bras that used to be £120 down to £20 – that sort of J. low. My pulse was racing madly from the bargain, never mind the sexy lingerie. But the polka dots and lace and cute details and nice fabrics were all good too.

Ok, ok, back to the break-up bit, because of course this blog is about the psychology behind purchases. Arvind and I broke up. I wasn’t going to mention it here, but since he has featured in my stories, we thought I should. We are still good friends and all is well. But I have moved back to New York… and bought lingerie! I mean, that’s what you do when you become single – you move continents and buy underwear, right?

I think Duty-Free is a big misnomer. Every time I travel internationally, I feel absolutely duty-bound to buy something at the airport, either on the way there, or on the way back, or both. Whoever idea duty-free was, is a genius. Actually, I seem to remember reading in some glossy mag that it was the idea of somebody called Frank Miller (father to the ugly Miller sisters, who pay publicists to get them into the social pages of said glossy mags). Well then, Mr. Miller was a genius.

Let’s be honest, the “duty-free” part is what consumer psychologists (I took a class in this last term) call an “enabling attribute.” An enabling attribute is something like anti-lock breaks on an expensive sports car – a practical feature that we use to rationalize a purchase that is really big-fat indulgence. The 10% or 15% that we save in tax at duty-free, which usually becomes rather insignificant by the time you count in vagaries of exchange rate and product availability, just lets us delude ourselves that we are being a responsible shopper.

The slight discount, supposedly unavailable ina any other venue, is just like the car salesman who says, “I’ll give you this price if you buy now, but if you come back tomorrow, it might not be available.” Another thing I learned in that consumer psychology class is that we are much more motivated by fear of potential regret – ie, we’d rather plonk down for something we don’t really need, than wake up tomorrow morning with despair in the pit of our stomach because we missed out on the only jar of Creme de la Mer that will ever be available to us in our whole lives! See, it taps into something really irrational.

The other genius things about duty free are that it happens at just the right time, when we are in holiday-mode, and thus ready to loosen all our normal responsible thinking, and have a good time. Those Gucci sunglasses that seem just a bit excessive in the normal course of things, all of a sudden seem the perfect emblem of our free-holiday-spirit. Go on, burn out the credit card – after all, in comparison to the price of the plane ticket and the rest of the trip, that new watch is just a drop in the bucket!!

And, even better, if we just think about it right, we can see that duty-free saves us even more money. First of all, there’s the fact that I always sample profusely, and use it as an opportunity to bolster my skin defenses against the coming onslaught of dry, recycled airplane air. I’d say two different kinds of eye gel, a moisturizer, and a refreshing facial mist is about par for a session of sampling at duty-free before boarding. The more expensive, obviously, the better – Chanel, La Prairie, and Creme de la Mer are all good stops.

Then, duty-free also saves us money by preventing the waste of unused foreign currency. Rather than just stuffing it in those “Change for Good” envelopes on the plane, if we have $5 worth of foreign currency left on the way back, it makes perfect sense to buy part of a $100 hat with that, the rest on credit card, just so you’re not wasting money. yeah.

For all of these reasons, for its very embodiment of holiday-ness, I look forward to duty-free. I look forward to whiling away the time before my flight amongst all the cosmetic concessions, and get annoyed when I am late to the airport and it cuts into my duty-free time. It represents holiday time, and in that sense (and that sense only) is actually duty-free.

That I will make a purchase at duty-free is almost a given. With all of these pressures, I am feeling extremely virtuous to say, this time my purchase was all of a Clarins juicy lip gloss, in the perfect bright-red, white-girl-in-the sunshine color.

Er, at least I was that good in New York. In Hong Kong a pair of sunglasses might have crept in. But I needed those.

Kuala Lumpur is one of those amazingly exotic sounding places, like Zanzibar or Samarkand – at least to my American ears. It is always mentioned in movies as the source of ocean tankers full of illicit cargo, or nefarious asian gang goings-on. Whenever I heard the name, it conjured images of sultry yellow lighting over semi-obscurred characters in luxuriously carved wooden rooms, sites of mysterious dealings and romantic liaisons.

Arriving there last Sunday, however, the actual Kuala Lumpur presents quite a different picture. Apparently, the Malaysians have been quite industrious over the past quarter century, and cleaned up most of the exotic, colonial “asianness” (pardon my Orientalism) that was the Kuala Lumpur of my fantasies. The “KL” of today is all modern high-rise, eight-lane highway, and gleaming mega-mall.

Seemingly, it should be the country for me: as one person I met told me, “the pastimes of most Malaysians are eating and shopping.” (This was offered in explanation of why none of the locals had been up the the jungle in the North of the country that is an international ecological treasure and tourist destination). Fair enough – although I did go to the jungle, I also went to the mall. And ate a lot. More on that:

What I didn’t find fair enough was the rampant sizism of the Malaysian malls! Even had I not been eating for Asia (and to be fair, with the 3-day juice fast that I did in Thailand, I think it all came out equal), there was not one thing in that mall that fit me!

Starting with shoes – we started with shoes because Arvind left my Christmas gift on the airplane, and thus was trying to replace it with a pair of casual, flippy, low-heels. We found the perfect pair at Bally… and then found that they only do up to a size 39. Apparently nowhere in the whole country, perhaps continent (because I tried again Hong Kong duty free) does higher! I am a size 40 – 9 US, 7 UK – which is perfectly normal and perhaps even small for someone who is 5′ 10″. However, if I lived in Kuala Lumpur, apparently I would have to go barefoot. Polite yet feckless, one sales person after another smiled and shook their heads, with absolute certainly that they did not have my size. Well then.

Stymied on the shoe front, and still in need of a Christmas pressie, I thought maybe some nice, tailored long jean shorts would be the thing. I spotted a Miss Sixty shop, and inside the perfect pair – just the right combination of funk and coy. And asked for my size: 30. Again, completely reasonable for all those of us who don’t make our living by walking a runway in Milan or Paris. And to think I had actually been feeling rather fit due to my juice fast. Oh contrare! The punky, spaghetti-noodle bodied salesboy came to my dressing room and announced: sorry, we don’t have that size ma’am! Here’s tip: if you ever want to feel utterly too big, like a kid outside of a candy store, just go shopping in Kuala Lumpur. At least it will save some cash. Which you will of course need to send with the therapist once you get back home.

In the end, my Christmas present from Arvind turned into a wallet. Turquoise patent leather, and very cute. Shockingly, wallets turn out to be the same size in Kuala Lumpur as everywhere else in the world – my credit cards fit into it no problem.

I am about to start on my xmas shopping, so watch this space for bigger items soon, but first I wanted to quickly muse on the random beauty of the late-night Walgreens run. I am lucky enough to live right next to a 24-hour Walgreens, one of the only things that does stay open all night in this town. This past Wednesday, after my big critique, and after the multiple sleepless nights leading up to it, and a lot of pizza and beer to celebrate with classmates, I found myself hitting the WG with my friend Bethany on our way home.

Somehow through my stupor, a profound appreciation for Walgreen welled up in my heart. Where else can you get protein bars with your cold medicine, cheesy christmas decorations with your toilet paper with your blank CDs? I love the way Walgreens has *everything* from food to electronics, to cleaning supplies to office supplies to drugs. I love how it is all bathed on terrible fluorescent light, and is all terrible beige peg-board shelving and mottled white linoleum. I sort of even love that there is always a drug addict plaintively asking for change outside the door, and a couple of jaded bored salespeople inside, and how when the line gets really long they make an announcement telling you the cosmetics counter is open. I love how they give you cash back, any amount even if you only buy a $.99 pack of gum, and how they sell drug panaceas for all sorts on ailments that are unmentionable in good company – just about one of the only places where you can let it all hang out, be broken. I love their hideous script typeface logo, that they have decided to modernize by rendering in blue and red neon. I love Walgreens because it is so utilitarian (and not in that trendy Home Depot way) so practical, so bell-and-whistle free, yet they always have everything. I love walking out with orange zest kitchen cleaner in the same bag with my Edy’s Toll-House cookie dough ice cream and a new pair of Tweezerman tweezers, and that its next door and open all the time.

Sometimes convenience without pretension is so comforting.

I just realized the other day that I have been terribly remiss! I have not told you about what is both my favorite handbag maker, and also a potentially semi-secret, that has not totally broken the mainstream. They are called… come closer, so you can hear me… Hayden Harnett. Go have a look, their bags are divine.

I have two. I almost never repeat purchases like that! My MBTs, that Origins face potion, of which I just bought another bottle, and now Hayden Harnett bags. I must be getting less fickle than in my younger years, finding products that work, and sticking with them.

Gosh, there just isn’t a whole long anecdote nor a deep analysis that goes along with these bags. They are just gorgeous and well made. The first one, the heavenly, buttery, orange-sherberty Havana Hobo bag I encountered in a boutique in Nolita last spring. In one of the moments when blind passion gets the better of you, and all of your (well, my anyway) better judgement about what the handbag budget of a student should be just flies out the window. I toted it with me all summer around London, and although it is a slouchy hobo bag as thus is somewhat trendy at the mo’, it SO stood head and shoulders above all the other hobo bags around that it might as well have been a different breed. The benefit of having spent, erm, invested wisely in that handbag was that the rest of my outfit could have been H&M finds and I could have passed it off for Chloe, because we all know that bags and shoes make the outfit.

The second one I got this fall, after my classmate Rob, made a comment something like, “Kate, its way after Labor Day – isn’t it about time you retired that sherbert orange bag??” with all the snideness of a gay fashion editor, despite that fact that he does sleep with women. I must admit I do not love the Anna frame bag as much as the Havana Hobo, but then, that would be impossible. By all normal standards, the Anna is a gem.

So, there you have it. No deep thoughts on the signification of the shapes, the social implications of the studs, or the ethical ethical considerations of the leather. When passion takes over, the rational mind cannot stop to analyze such things. Enjoy!

Ok, girls and boys, no more talk of microscopic nasties or the banalities of daily newspapers. I have recently bought something utterly fabulous. Arvind I and I have just spent a long weekend in LA, land of sunshine, exhaust, and laid-back chic. Nothing and nobody in LA look like they are trying too hard, but when they get it right (silly boob jobs and bad Botox are NOT right), they manage to be utterly, languidly fabulous.

True to form, I bought several things in LA that warrant careful dissection and discussion. But, the very coolest, the one I absolutely must tell you about right away, my wonderfully guilty purchase, is this beautiful necklace from Kaviar & Kind.

Apparently, Kaviar & Kind is something of a legend. It was recommend to me by my actress friend Indira, after I admired a ring she had gotten from there. The sales lady informed me that, “We are so well known that designers usually send us their stuff. It is more a process of filtering than searching.” And I must defer, everything they had in there was spectacularly elegant, breathtakingly unique, and stunningly hip.

The shop itself was a bit strange. Even though Indira had told me about it, and that it was on Sunset quite near to our hotel, I actually stumbled upon it by mistake, in pursuit of a nail salon instead. (See – it was meant to be!) The shop was quite a plain, non-descript white strip-mall box. Rather than noting the sign, I was intrigued by the jewelry on display, and only then realized that I had happened up on the pirate’s treasure, despite its odd housing. And this necklace was one of the first things I laid my eyes on, and it was love at first sight. The rosy colored gold, with the two vintage black cameo-fobs, hanging off a thick gold ring, just so… I think it is that jaunt, the careless way they rest on my sternum and tumble over each other as I move, that really got me. Also the perfect mix of delicate and sturdy, and the combination of heritage (made form vintage watch parts, chains, jewelry pieces etc), and GOTH. It is a talisman, and amulet, bestowing a whole semi-mysterious heritage, if not special powers, upon its wearer. The whole thing says something like “care-free vixen sorceress.” Like maybe I am a shape-shifter, or have been around for thousands of years, only now taking on the form of a young woman named Kate. Yeah, magic. Cool.

Alas, summer is over. The last Bank Holiday (for the Brits in the house) and Labor Day (for the Americans) have passed, and we are into September. This month always brings that back-to-school feeling, long after we’ve graduated from colored pencil sets, Hello Kitty erasers, and trapper keepers. Or even from heavy organic chem textbooks and college sweats. Of course, I haven’t graduated form any of that, or rather have come back to it. I have a somewhat bittersweet feeling as I start what will most definitely be my last year in school until I am, like, retired.
Getting back into the harness of early alarm clocks and constant assignments and deadlines always chaffs the tenderized summer skin. But I do love the autumn – with its crisp air, crackling leaves, and anticipatory melancholy, it is very possibly my favorite season. And I love something about gearing up again, getting the mind going to learn and think new things. If summer is about indulgent laissez-faire, autumn is about fresh ambitions and new projects. My inner Puritan list-ticker eats it up.

To honor that inner school head-mistress, not to mention to look chic when my eyes are so tired from multiple all-nighters that to insert my contact lenses would feel like scraping my eyeballs with sandpaper, I treated myself to a new pair of back-to-school glasses. Eyeglasses trends are somewhat like jeans trends – they morph subtly from year to year, so that you can easily miss the change, and then all of a sudden wake up one morning with a closet full of boot-cut jeans while the rest of the world has moved onto skinnies. This was the case with my old frames – they were perfectly respectable small, squarish, dark brown frames. I distinctly remember that when I got them about 5 years ago, their smallness and darkness felt very stylish. They were a statement that I was joining the ranks of small-ly, darkly bespectacled designers.

That was 2001, and now that I am firmly within those ranks in 2006, sadly the glasses were feeling a bit dull. Giorgio Armani and 20/20 Optics to the rescue. My new ones are pistachio green (faux) tortoise shell, with thicker arms (is that what the things that go over your ears are called??) and a bling-ish monogram at the hinge. Green is, of course, the new black. Or at least everybody’s favorite color right now. It also makes a nice contrast with my dark eyes and hair (at least it did in the super lighting they had in the shop – I have yet to get quite the same effect under normal light conditions…), and somehow makes me feel Swedish – northern skies over wheat fields or something.

With glasses it is absolutely critical to get ones that project the right image. While most frames will automatically grant you a couple of IQ points in others eyes, “smart” is not always “sexy” in our intellectual-phobic culture. The line between looking alluringly switched-on and looking like a big nerd is scarily thin, and the wrong glasses can very firmly place a hapless bookworm into the ‘untouchable’ category. We all know poor, perfectly nice souls from our high school years to whom this happened – they just let mom or the eye doctor suggest something, ended up with those horrid squarish gold-chrome frames with the double bar over the nose, and have suffered the social consequences ever since.

The right frames however, can project intelligence, power, and sophistication. All of which are good attributes to have. And, if you wear them right, sexy.

Well, if you thought I got away form Marrakech with just a couple of rugs, you still don’t know me very well! The total booty haul was:

2 rugs
1 yummy woolen winter hat
1 gorgeous rafia woven handbag
3 punched tin lamps (2 are a wedding gift for my friend Steph)
3 bottles of rose water
1 black leather belt with gold studs (woof!)
1 malachite ring
1 pair of handmade leather slippers

Plus an assortment of food, drink, and entertainment, including 2 hammams and 2 suppers at the amazing outdoor food stalls in Place Jemma El Fna.

If this seems like a lot, you will be amazed at the restraint I showed, given all that I possibly could have bought out of the pile of teak, ceramics, leather, silk, spice, and on and on that jammed the souk

I am particularly chuffed about the hat, which is just toffee-colored hand know yumminess and will be a constant companion this winter (unsure why the Moroccan knit heavy woolen hats? it was over 100 degrees the whole time). And also the tin lamps, which were made by Mak’s friend Hassan Hajjaj, who is Morocco’s answer to Andy Warhol. He takes traditional Moroccan crafts, and mashes them up with funky pop references. Very cool stuff, and a big shout out to both him and Abdul for giving me a bit of orientation around Marrakech. If you are ever there, you must stay his Riad Yima.

Anyway, what can I say? I love traveling, and I loved Marrakech – warm desert air and dusty pink walls, donkeys in the streets and snake charmers in the square. Mint tea and more mint tea. Objects are memory devices, a physical way to bring home and save a small bit of a beautiful experience. I don’t know when I will get back there, but padding about my apartment in my handsewn leather slippers, I will remember the souk fondly and, just perhaps, be able to close my eyes and feel a warm ray of the north african sun.

As I’ve mentioned, I am living on Portobello Road. Despite having been long ago “discovered”, despite the fact that it has gentrified to the point where the odor of fresh minted bills wafting from the pockets of resident Swiss bankers is now much stronger than the traditional smell of ganja, despite all this Portobello Road remains an active, happening, charming place. And of coarse, one with abundant shopping opportunities. The street market is the heart of the neighborhood, and the reason it has managed to resist as much of the blandification process as it has. (Also the trustafarians, who like to keep it slightly ratty as a lifestyle choice, but that is another story.)

Every Saturday, the world descends on Portobello – tourists of all shapes and accents mill from the Notting Hill Gate tube stop, through the antique stalls, through the fruit and vegetable stalls, toward the clothing and knick-knack stalls toward the Ladbroke Grove end of the street, getting solicited by head massagers and street performers along the way. For me street markets are like eating pie – despite seeming sweet and appealing to begin with, they soon reach saturation point when I want to run screaming from them. And of course can’t, because they are so damn crowded. So, despite having the market on my doorstep, I don’t often go shopping in it.

However, when I need a cheap and trendy treat, there is no better place. Recently this was the case with these sunglasses:

which I have also noticed Almost Girl Julie Frederickson wearing on several of her posts. I am the first to admit that I am not on the bleeding edge of fashion trends, and embarrassingly enough, I first clocked these shades on Victoria Beckham during all the World Cup coverage of the WAGS (wives and girlfriends, of course) fashion capers. Slightly ridiculous, but in the most of-the-moment 60s redux way, they seemed like the perfect candidates for a quick accessory fling, but not something to blow the child-support check on. (Not having a child, and hence not receiving any child support checks, is only all the more reason.)

Mine cost all of £6. They are slightly wonky, and have no nice monogram logo on the sides. But they do claim to cut out the ultraviolet rays, are surprisingly nice to wear because the lenses are so big that they cut out most of the peripheral light. I alternate them with my $200 pair of Armani aviator-esque shades, and lately the market ones have been getting more play time. Maybe its summertime, but a cheap rip-ff off Posh Spice’s latest bug-eyed silliness feels just the thing.