From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Seasonal Pain and Suffering
What's next, lawsuits for fashion crimes?
The holiday shopping season officially begins today. Purchases will be made--repeatedly!--taxing budgets and the patience of all concerned. Somebody has got to pay for this sorry state of affairs. Somebody has got to take the blame. But who? Who?
Apparently the people who are doing the selling. As we learned recently, Bronx teenagers Jazlyn Bradley (5'6", 270 pounds) and Ashley Pelman (4'10", 170 pounds) are suing McDonald's for damages related to their, well, super size. The Golden Arches, they claim, made them obese. A district-court judge has yet to rule on the merits of the case, but the would-be defendants and their confreres are clearly concerned. "Within the industry, it has gotten everyone's attention," Steven C. Anderson, president of the Restaurant Association, told the New York Times.
If it's true that misery loves company, the Golden Arches should be cheered about the $50-million suit that free-lance journalist Meredith Berkman, 37, launched earlier this year against Robert's American Gourmet Food, makers of the snack food Pirate's Booty, for ruining her diet. Researchers at the Good Housekeeping Institute found that the addictive (pardon the editorializing) corn puffs contained three times the fat listed on the label, and this inaccurate information, claimed Ms. Berkman, caused weight gain and emotional distress. Other snackers in a separate class-action suit agreed to a settlement requiring American Gourmet Food to distribute $3.5 million in product coupons.
One could argue that there are far better aerobic workouts for the supposedly weight-conscious than working the legal system. One could talk about the need for tort reform--or perhaps that ought to be torte reform. And, yes, one could bemoan the denial of personal responsibility, a frequent dodge in our cheerfully self-indulgent culture.
But the real concern here ought to center on precedent. If one can tilt at Micky D.'s or plunder the Pirate's Booty coffers, what business can breathe easy? Certainly not the advertising industry. "The minute you write a Burger King or McDonald's commercial, you're in line to be sued. You're another defendant," says legendary ad man Jerry Della Femina. "If someone turns pleasure around on us, it's over. You're talking to an endangered species. I haven't had a decent night's sleep since this suit was started."
Certainly not health clubs, where the beefy can look at the buff and litigate, claiming a loss of self-esteem. Not sofa makers, whose wares have enticed innocent people to sit and thereby become couch potatoes. Not movie companies, whose films, children can claim, kept them from their homework and thus from the college of their choice.
And not educational institutions. "When I hear story like the one about McDonald's," says Jody Cukier, who runs the alumni interview process for Harvard College in West Los Angeles, "I wonder, taking things to a ridiculous extreme: If you go to a college that doesn't suit you or where you don't do well, can you hold the admissions office liable?"
Less academic: What store can consider itself safe from a disgruntled consumer? No small matter at this time of year. Sak's Fifth Avenue and Giorgio Armani, among other stores, chuckled nervously when I posed the question but declined to comment.
"Now that the general public is taking absolutely no responsibility, we retailers are starting to get anxious," says Simon Doonan, creative director of the Manhattan clothier Barney's. "If people are suing McDonald's for making them fat, one does wonder how far we are from an era where individuals will attempt to sue us when they buy clothes that make them look fat. Or when we make things look so irresistible that people buy them even if they can't afford them."
Consider how the fates of shopaholics Lily Bart and Emma Bovary would have been altered had this notion been in place during the 19th century. In an episode of "Sex and the City," Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw calculates that resisting the lure of her 100 pairs of Manola Blahniks would have furnished the down payment on an apartment. "But no shoe-aholic would go after Blahnik," says Mr. Doonan. "They need him."
Mr. Doonan cautions any non-Blahnik designer who makes precarious footwear--shoes with heels high enough for convincing suicide attempts--to keep a sharp eye on the McDonald's case. When Sara Nelson, a contributing editor at Glamour magazine, took a spill in a new pair of high-priced platform mules, she fantasized, she says, about hitting up the designer Stephane Kelian for damages. "What do you mean, nobody made me buy them," she imagined telling the prosecuting attorney during cross-examination. "What do you call seeing Ellen Barkin wearing them on 'The Today Show' then?"
"If you're in some store that's very austere and utilitarian," says Kim France, editor of the shopping magazine Lucky, "you can turn yourself into this austere utilitarian person where you think you need the white motorcycle pants for every day. Then you leave and what you bought makes no sense whatsoever." No doubt this will soon be called retail disassociative disorder.
"I was just looking at a pair of Yves Saint Laurent safari pants I bought last year that I feel very oppressed by," Ms. France continues. "They were very one-season and I just had no idea. It's absurd. Forget it. I have things in my closet that I can't even look at. I would love the idea that stores would have accountability. It would be wonderful if we could invoice all the retail mistakes we made."
Of course, Ms. France is aware that in her role as magazine editor she is, in a literal sense, the accessory to such crimes of fashion. "I am very complicit in this. The peasant look alone would bury me." She notes that her magazine tries to include the least expensive version of every look it features. "Initially I thought it was a favor we were doing for our readers, but now I think it's a favor we were doing for our lawyers."
Ah, yes, lawyers. Don't some of them lure us all to become more litigious? Why isn't there a lawsuit in that?
Ms. Kaufman is a writer in New York.
