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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
It was hard, in the weeks before the landslide victory last October of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the left-wing candidate in Brazil's recent Presidential election, to find anyone who was very enthusiastic about his opponent, Jose Serra. Serra was a well-regarded economist and former health minister whose record of public service was accompanied by a deficit of charisma so severe that even his supporters noted his physical resemblance to Uncle Fester of the Addams Family. It was hard to find support for Serra, but not impossible, and a good place to look was within the cream-colored, heavily guarded walls of Daslu, a women's clothing store in a wealthy residential district of Sao Paulo. The store--which is windowless and has clusters of unsmiling security guards standing at its entrances, as if it were the embassy of a particularly beleaguered nation--caters to rich Brazilians, members of the ten per cent of the population who command nearly half the national income, and wear Chanel, Valentino, or Dolce & Gabbana. The Daslu customer does not speak in the voice of the man or woman on the street, not least because Daslu customers don't actually walk on the street but are driven around in Mercedeses that have been equipped with bulletproof windows and armored panels and, in some cases, gun-carrying chauffeurs. So, with the inevitable victory of Lula, as the new President is known, drawing near, the political chatter in the store ran to resigned humor at the dark days to come.
Six days before the election, a customer named Ruthinha Malzoni was at Daslu, making her selections from the designer collections that had just arrived from Europe. Malzoni is one of the city's better-known society figures, on account of her striking beauty, her startling agelessness, her personal charm, and her svelte aplomb when it comes to wearing the latest designer creations. She had arrived at the store wearing a white silk Dolce & Gabbana tailored suit and a vividly colored bustier by Dior, a massive crucifix of Brazilian gems resting on a cantilevered bosom, and had settled into a curtained area with a rackful of clothes and a small gaggle of salesgirls, who rushed back and forth with armfuls of finery. Every so often, a maid in a black dress with a white lace collar and cuffs would appear with a tray, offering cups of espresso and glasses of water.
The real had slipped to its lowest point yet, almost four to the dollar; but the nation's financial crisis did not appear to be having any effect on Malzoni's life style. She didn't need to try on any Chanel outfits, she said, because she'd been in Paris a month earlier, staying at the Plaza Athenee, and had been unable to resist popping across the street to the Chanel boutique. She was in the market for clothes for a New Year's trip to Hawaii, though she declared the gauzy four-and-a-halfthousand-real Blumarine dress she tried on for that purpose to be ugly. "I look like I could be taking care of children in this dress,"she said. More to her liking was a fifteen-thousand-real beaver-fur bomber jacket by Dolce & Gabbana that could be worn only in the cold Northern Hemisphere, and a seven-thousand-real sequinned skirt by Blumarine that could be worn only after dark. Stripped to a thong and hopping in and out of outfits as swiftly as if she were playing a dozen characters in a one-woman show, she also purchased a black Valentino pants suit that tied in front, a bias-cut Prada skirt, a pair of velvet pants from Chloe, and a pair of high-heeled Dolce & Gabbana sandals that were adorned with enough dangling jewels to equip a chandelier.
Malzoni and her husband live in an apartment in a modern, high-security high-rise in Sao Paulo which has the atmosphere of a Parisian mansion from a more gracious era, with heavy swag curtains and antiqued mirror panels and gray-painted walls hung with twentieth-century Brazilian art. The Malzonis spend their weekends at the family "farm,"an estate an hour outside Sao Paulo. Their large mansard-roofed house faces a lake and is surrounded by an eighteen-hole golf course, built to Paulo Malzoni's design. Paulo, who is Malzoni's third husband, develops shopping malls in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but Ruthinha comes from a political family--her father was a senator, and her grandfather was the governor of a southern Brazilian state.
"I don't think we're going to have as many parties as we have clothes once Lula is elected,"she said, trying on a pair of black-and-gold evening pants. "The husbands are all going to be too upset for parties."Either that or the parties would be ones she couldn't bring herself to...
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