MCFEATTERS: Getting careful

COMMENTARY:

It’s considered bad form nowadays to flaunt your money if you’ve still got it. And it’s considered really bad form to flaunt your money if you’ve still got it and your investors don’t. This is a lesson learned with some pain by Citigroup and John Thain, the former chief of Merrill Lynch.

In the face of oceans of bad publicity, Citigroup canceled a $50 million order of a Dassault Falcon 7X corporate jet. (What? The makers of luxury jets don’t deserve a little stimulus, too?)

And Mr. Thain has been awkwardly trying to explain the reasoning behind a lavishly redecorated office that included such amenities as an $87,000 rug, six dining-room chairs for $37,000 and a $1,400 waste basket, all perhaps conducive to an environment in which to lose $15 billion in 90 days.

Thus, we have come to the era of the unmarked shopping bag. Rather than upset the common people by unnecessarily bearing purchases in bags marked Gucci and Tiffany, socially sensitive shoppers are asking the stores for plain white bags.

The blog Daily Beast reports that Kathleen Fuld, the wife of the CEO of bankrupt Lehman Brothers who drops $5,000 to $10,000 at a time in Hermes, is skipping the distinct orange Hermes shopping bag in favor of an unlabeled white bag. There’s no telling which former client you might run into panhandling on a street corner.

The truly careful are removing high-end designer labels from their clothes and replacing them with labels from more proletarian brands.

Associated Press trend watcher John Rogers reports from Beverly Hills, “Despite the slump, the affluent still maintain lifestyles that would seem extravagant to the vast majority of Americans - hundreds of dollars spent at exclusive restaurants, thousands dropped on shopping sprees.” (What are a few extravagant lifestyles among the 300 million of us embarked on the great experiment we call America? Or, maybe the guillotine will make a comeback.)

“What’s different now,” Mr. Rogers writes, “is the extra care some are putting into making themselves seem more like everybody else.” They’re no longer, one could imagine, ordering $300 bottles of wine at lunch. If they do, it’s served in a box or decanted into an old Boone’s Farm bottle. The rearing-horse emblem is taken off the Ferrari and replaced by a plate identifying the car as a Prius. The Rolls has a bumper sticker claiming it runs entirely on recycled lawn clippings.

The lady of the house still wears the mink, but a tag tells passersby that the coat is made “100 percent from recycled roadkill.” She can claim, if she can keep a straight face, that she spared living creatures while simultaneously beautifying our highways.

And if you have a mansion it’s OK to keep it, but you might want to pick up something at a foreclosure sale in case it’s ever necessary to feign living in considerably more modest digs.

And your backup house should be in a shabby but still genteel neighborhood - the kind of place where former investors are now living. Do not let John Thain’s decorator near the place.

Dale McFeatters is a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.