Monday, August 24, 2009

OUCH.

Cintra Wilson NY Times Style writer gets hammered by readers, bloggers and her own editor on her review of JC Penny's Moving in to Midtown.


“Why would this dowdy Middle American entity waddle into Midtown in its big old shorts and flip-flops” without even a makeover of its logo, asked the columnist, Cintra Wilson, a virtual sneer seeming to drip from her keyboard. She said Penney’s “has always trafficked in knockoffs that aren’t quite up to Canal Street’s illegal standards”; “a good 96 percent” of the clothing is polyester; the racks are full of sizes 10, 12 and 16, but not Wilson’s 2; the petites department has plenty of clothing “for women nearly as wide as they are tall”; and the store “has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on.”

her rebuttal? a couple of apologies and this statement

Wilson told me she usually writes about “obscure stores that don’t exist outside of Manhattan,” and she thinks of her audience as “1,300 women in Connecticut and urban gay guys in Manhattan.” She said it was “kind of provincial of me” not to realize how big The Times was and how her audience would expand when she reviewed a store like Penney’s. She said she also thought she hit a raw nerve with people already disposed to think of The Times as disconnected and unsympathetic. “It was dumb on my part not to see this coming,” she said.

2 comments:

Angeleen said...

I don't normally shop at Penney's, but... Yuck!

I lack words to describe Wilson's "brand" of ugliness.

Richie Designs said...

yah, can't say that I've shopped there in the past 30 years but it was pretty harsh.

I would imagine that it's a viable place for many americans.

the mannequin line kinda made me laugh a little though...is that horrible?