Meet the Rich Fashion Couple Who Love Africa, the Winklevoss Twins
"They are not exactly starting from the gutter" is certainly one way of contextualizing Matthew and Nicole Mellon, fledgling husband-and-wife fashion designers whose last name comes from, yes, the bank. The duo appeared in yesterday's Times, saying the perfect things rich people say in the Times.
"I've never been to Africa, but I feel like I have this deep affinity for it," would be one of those quotes, said enthusiastically by Nicole, who met Matthew at a wedding in Palm Beach a few years before they themselves would be wed at Diane von Furstenberg's estate in Jamaica. "I've read every Hemingway, we collect Peter Beard, I've watched 'Out of Africa,'" she says. "It touches your soul to visit and smell the smells, and you can't recreate the experience without immersing yourself."
The Mellons are the operators of a website called hanleymellon.com, which features outfits for people who yearn to spend tens of thousands of dollars on clothes but have no one to tell them what to wear. They are expanding out to a proprietary fashion line, an area in which Matthew—a one-time creative director at Jimmy Choo—has experience.
But all of that is the window dressing for the details that make the insulated rich feel sophisticated/provides the rest of us with shit to laugh at. Like, for instance, a child named Force. Or Matthew forgetting the name of the artist Sam Taylor-Wood and calling her Taylor Swift. Or this, which represents some sort of new frontier for the airhead rich given platforms in America's paper of record in order to hang themselves.
But Mr. Mellon is an unabashed fan of embracing new technologies, including Bitcoin, which the company accepts as payment and to which he was introduced by the venture capitalists Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
A fairy tale ending indeed.
[image via Getty]