Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 6

Palatial Inheritance & The Shallow End of the Gene Pool

Failed CEO Laudomia Pucci.

Laudomia Pucci lives in a 15^th Century, 150-acre estate in the Tuscan countryside. From the pose she strikes in the photo on page 85 of the Wall Street Journal Magazine that we simply can not stop making fun of, it is difficult to tell whether she feels embarrassed and awkward or stupidly entitled. She inherited the estate and the family’s fashion business in 1989 at the ripe age of 29 and, as stated in the article Fortress of Fashion (a title which will become clearly ironic in a minute), “took over both the business and creative sides.” As the next (and, one writer predicts, last) in a long line of fashion conquistadors, she found her unearned responsibility "a challenge.”

Presumably because working for Daddy all those few short cushy years wasn’t.

Her razor-sharp mind becomes immediately evident as we are told, shortly before we start barfing in repulsion at the photos of what this numbskull was born into, that Laudomia “knew” when she took over for her deceased father that her ticket to ridiculous wealth – the family’s “fashion legacy” as it were – was in trouble. And Ms. Laudomia, whose name sounds suspiciously like the Italian word for Laundromat, waited 20 years to do anything about it.

Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 5

Time is a Waste of Money

The fifth installment in the series. These people have no idea the fodder they are providing.

Imagine: someone comes up to you and asks to take your picture. “Okay,” you say, because you’re cool like that. But then the person asks you to dress in this gold foil suit. And strike a pose like you are feeling the beginning stages of a hernia. “Now, look at the camera like you know you’re sexy!”

Um…come again?

Now imagine you are showing up at the studio for the eightieth time, to have people take your picture for $5,000 an hour. Same gold foil get-up. Same hernia pose. “Now, look at the camera like you know you are sexy!”

Not so hard anymore, is it?

Now imagine you are the cameraman. Or the guy who holds the big illuminated umbrella for the cameraman. Or the person who buys the magazine with Miss Golden Hernia on the cover.

No matter who you are, if it’s your first time the whole thing seems ridiculous. Why? Because it is. Stick around, though, and everything changes. No matter who you are – the model, the cameraman, the umbrella man or the chump who buys the magazine – this sort of thing goes to your head. “Now you know you are sexy!”

This has got to be the dynamic behind WSJ’s ridiculous magazine. Because if they saw their watch ads like a normal person - or like a person like me - they simply wouldn't publish them. Fortunately for the rest of us they are too into themselves to understand.