The scene: Two hard-bitten dames conflict over a person. At difficulty: Did one steal the opposite’s lover, then go on to marry … and homicide him?
One of many girls, Margaux Goldrich, is fictional. The opposite is the Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon, who performs a flinty model of herself grilling Margaux, an imperious vogue diva performed by Patricia Black, concerning the character’s suspected function in her husband’s premature loss of life.
You gained’t discover this brooding melodrama on Netflix. The narrative spools out as a substitute on social media as a string of darkly comedian vignettes conceived and produced by the jewellery designer Alexis Bittar as a part of an ongoing advertising and marketing marketing campaign for his namesake firm.
Mr. Bittar — who began his model within the late Nineteen Nineties, bought it to Brooks Brothers in 2015 and purchased the enterprise again three years in the past — launched the video marketing campaign final fall. Ms. Sarandon, 77, is the most recent and arguably largest identify to seem within the dozens of brief episodes which have since been launched on the Alexis Bittar Instagram and TikTok accounts. “I used to be drawn to what he has created with these satirical and unconventional skits,” she mentioned through textual content message.
Different over-the-top, style-world personalities who’ve appeared as variations of themselves embrace: Mel Ottenberg, a stylist and the editor in chief of Interview Journal; the mannequin Coco Rocha; the nightlife fixture Amanda Lepore; and Kelly Cutrone, the tartly outspoken vogue publicist who has starred in her personal actuality TV present.
Then there may be Ms. Black, 66, an actress, because the turban-wrapped Margaux, an Higher East Aspect harpy who all through the marketing campaign lobs icy highhanded calls for at her long-suffering private assistant, Jules, performed by Julie J, a efficiency artist and drag performer.
Ms. Sarandon, as could also be anticipated, will get gentler therapy from Margaux, who admires the floral-patterned biker jacket that Ms. Sarandon wears within the marketing campaign (it was her personal) and her upswept umber-tinted hair. Margaux additionally fawns over Ms. Sarandon’s stardom and left-leaning politics. “You have been on the market combating for the folks,” Margaux tells her, sliding in a coy reference to Ms. Sarandon’s ceaseless activism.
With the video marketing campaign, Mr. Bittar, 55, needed to “create a neighborhood,” he mentioned, one he hopes would reply not simply to the bangles and luggage he has embedded in every episode however to the sequence’ crazily proliferating forged of barb-spewing characters.
“I needed folks to talk their minds and say inappropriate issues,” Mr. Bittar mentioned, “the way in which somebody, even in at this time’s woke local weather, would possibly truly converse.”
He additionally “needed to create a love letter to New York,” he mentioned. “A part of that love includes displaying characters I’ve recognized by way of my years within the trade.” Some, like Margaux, “have been horrible folks,” Mr. Bittar added, however they’ve influenced him simply the identical.
Margaux, he acknowledged, is a heady composite of autocratic tastemakers — amongst them the Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland, in addition to Marina Schiano, a Vogue mannequin turned stylist and vogue government — decreased, deliberately, to a vogue stereotype.
Sasha Charnin Morrison, 59, who as soon as labored for Ms. Schiano and toiled for years within the vogue departments of Harper’s Bazaar, Us Weekly and Elle, mentioned that some viewers might write off Margaux and Jules as cartoons. “However I used to be Jules,” mentioned Ms. Morrison, who’s now a contract author and digital content material creator. “That was my life.”
She added that the marketing campaign evokes her nostalgia for the times when, as she put it, “you by no means knew on a Friday when you have been fired, however you’d all the time come again for extra abuse on Monday.”
Those that can’t relate to a vogue dragon like Margaux should discover the character acquainted. “All of us labored for anyone who has been a Margaux or had a mom who was that,” Ms. Black mentioned. “These relationships exist, so why not loosen up and make enjoyable of them?”
Ms. Cutrone, the publicist, was thrilled on the likelihood to play her bawdy, trash-talking self “occasions 100,” she mentioned. She speculated that Mr. Bittar’s video sequence will be the begin of “extra vogue folks going into directing and proudly owning their content material.”
She, like Ms. Sarandon and different contributors, obtained no financial fee for her look.
So what made her take the job?
With a hoot, Ms. Cutrone replied, “I’ll work for bangles.”
