Stop Staring at that Box, You'll Ruin Your Eyes

And so it was: the episode in which Whitney’s incredible Hills and fancy fashion designer fame turned her into a raucous bitch. I’m not sure if this was put upon her by the producers — I bet at least in part that there was some poking and prodding on their parts since the Olivia-is-a-bitch cow has nearly been milked dry. But the emotions behind the eventual breakdown seem to be genuine. Let’s discuss how it all went down.

In Elle-land Joe is tasking Olivia with helping him select clothing for a Martha Stewart spot. They’re featuring five up-and-coming designers on the show and they’re missing one, so Olivia needs to go to a potential designer’s showroom and pick out some looks. This is a really important assignment, as the segment on Martha Stewart is a pretty big deal. When’s the last time you saw a 17-minute fashion segment on a nationally syndicated talk show? Never? Once on Oprah? You have a job and don’t watch television during the day? Well, it’s a pretty big deal for Erin, who garnered this whole segment deal and the City deal and was just type-A enough to write herself into the show. It’s so important to Olivia that she shows up to the meeting with nothing to take notes with. No pen. No paper. No iPad. When Joe Zee tells her that she ought to be writing all of this down she has the gall to ask him for a pen and paper. Then, when Joe Zee hands her one, the chick can’t even stand up to take it from him — she makes Erin pass it to her. I would commend her on her iron balls if I wasn’t so sure that she’s just self-involved enough to actually believe that she deserves to be waited on by everyone around her. Sometimes I wish for a zombie apocalypse just to watch people with this go down.

When she visits the designer’s showroom, she’s no better. No doubt, Olivia has impeccable style. She can wear a silk, women’s shirt with a cummerbund and an A-line pencil skirt like nobody’s business, and I will balk that there is no one else under 30 who I would rather see in pearls. But she has absolutely no ability to remove herself from her own personal sense of style. She can’t imagine anything but her own aesthetic being the end goal so she lazily infuses her own style into every job that she does. When meeting with the designer she does the same thing. He brings out models wearing flirty, young cocktail dresses. It’s perfect premiere-wear, things that could be easily tailored to a 20-something audience with multiple credit cards and sell really, really well. But Olivia doesn’t wear those kinds of dresses. She doesn’t do flirty hems and wouldn’t be caught dead in a color block dress. So, she spots something older and stuffier on the rack and makes the model walk up and down in that. It’s brilliant because she “loves menswear” and because it’s something that she would wear and because she gets to imprint her own opinion onto something else that’s going on without actually having done any work. Ugh.

The segment runs, Martha is awkward as all hell, she loves the look that Olivia chose and somehow that’s vindication. I mean, if there’s one thing that Martha Stewart is famous for, it’s her chic style. The only other thing of import that happens in this storyline is a deliciously creepy scene when Robby Myers turns to Martha Stewart and says, “You’re so beautiful,” and then just keeps staring at her with her Praying Mantis eyes. Ah-maze-ing.

The real meat of the episode, though, is the drama between Whitney and Roxy. “Working” in the People’s Revolution offices, the two are swooped down upon by a (perpetually) out of breath Kelly Cutrone. Really though, I think that this constant need to physically slow down is the best outward manifestation of her inner PR shark. Even more than her black tunics and power boots. She’s all-aflutter because Lights is in town and has just been robbed of their stage costumes and needs other clothes. This is a major emergency because Lights is a very important pop group with many fans and many albums and many tie-in deals with MTV. At least they’re popular in Canada. That’s something, eh.

Roxy is charged with getting the singer to wear some Whitney Eve pieces onstage at their big New York show. It seems simple enough, but then the singer comes waltzing in she looks like a bad Joan Jett impression. Getting her to wear lace aubergine leggings might be a bit of a stretch. Roxy does her best though, and after gravitating toward a rack of clothes that is obviously much more her style, Roxy pulls the only thing in Whitney’s whole line that might work — a black, leather jacket. It’s a miracle that it happens at all and when the concert goes on — there are so many people there! Why are they all there?! — Roxy really ought to be proud of herself. But then the unspeakable happens! That bitch of a singer comes out on stage, realizes that stage lights heat up the room about 30 additional degrees, and TAKES THE JACKET OFF!

Whitney just about blows a gasket. You can see her heavy bottom lip, so much heavier from the injustice of the moment, hit the ground. She’s had too much of this shit and she’s leaving. Backstage, after checking with the photographer to make sure that a photo with the jacket on came out (it did), she finds Whitney. Like a fame-hungry jackal she lashes out at Roxy. Why was there only a jacket?! How could she take it off?! Why is Roxy such a failure?! Whitney, you need to back the truck off.

The next morning Roxy brings Whitney tea. As if she’s the person who needs to be apologizing. After taking the tea Whitney starts laying into her again. Hey lady, we are not in Nuremburg. You can’t just point fingers with no kind of evidence. The girl tried to fight a losing battle for you and you’re treating her like this. The argument ends in Roxy saying that she wants to move out and we’re set up for a pretty dramatic episode next week.