Pam Stone: Do you know Italian for ‘sucker’?

Ever heard of the Italian fashion house, Balenciaga?

Neither had I. In fact, if it doesn’t come from Carhartt, I’m unaware of any recent fashion trends. Long gone are the days when I was actually given clothes by a L.A. designer to wear during television appearances. These days, I’m like a bewildered, middle aged guy, holding up a purple shirt and and a brown pair of paisley pants, asking his exasperated wife if it matches.

Accessorized, naturally, with work gloves and muck boots.

You might, however, want to google Balenciaga because, boys and girls, you might just strike it rich. For Balenciaga is releasing a very limited supply of severely distressed tennis shoes. These ’Paris sneakers’ have been destroyed to the point where you wouldn’t even consider donating them to Goodwill. They look as if they’d been a play toy for a Mastiff and left in the back yard for the last two years. They are ripped, frayed, filthy and if you have $1,850 to part with that could, instead, have been used for therapy, you can bring home a pair from this ‘exclusive collection.’

And what the h*** did Paris ever do to have such a defiled item named after that jewel box of a city?

To be fair, it should be said that Balenciaga has ‘less dirtied’ versions for around $650. It should also be said that there are people out there that will buy anything if it’s expensive enough. To illustrate: I knew of an amateur artist who glued some seashells to a masonite board, attached some fishing netting and spray painted the whole thing. The sort of decor you’d see at a Long John Silver’s. This artist put it in a little Malibu gallery which stuck on a price of $650. When it didn’t sell for months, she telephoned the gallery and told an assistant she needed to make some money, and to ’take off a zero.’ However, the assistant mistakenly thought she meant ‘add a zero’ and priced the monstrosity at $6,500. It sold within a week.

So raid your closets, kids, and find the skankiest pair of sneakers you own. Put them on and walk through a field of cow pats. Bathe them in red clay and stick ‘em on E-bay. And why stop there? I envision an entire line of filthy farm couture: sweat stained baseball caps, frayed and smelly sweat shirts, the whole 9 yards. We’ll undercut Balenciaga by a hundred bucks in price, hire a few ‘influencers’ to pose wearing them in hazy morning sunlight in a field, topped off with horse feed tubs on their heads.

With my limited grasp of Italian, I even came up with the perfect name for our collection: Ventosa. Doesn’t that sound great? Fresh, dynamic, audacious...

It’s also Italian for ‘sucker.’