Toronto Life and the case
of the little red dress
Toronto Life magazine's style blog tapped into a motherlode of online controversy this week when blogger Courtney Shea featured an apparently innocuous Q & A about a "best dressed" socialite named Deena Pantalone and her economical little red cocktail dress.Pantalone (whose dad is president of National Homes in Toronto and who is a partner with her siblings in a local development firm) claimed the dress was "a really old vintage dress" that she had redesigned and had stitched by "one of those tiny mom-and-pop seamstress shops on Queen West".
Then the comment floodgates opened, not least of all from the Queen West designer Caroline Lim who designed the dress and sold it to Pantalone last month for $159. In a comment thread and Twitter storm that got by turns ugly and hilarious, Pantalone was hung out to dry by the readers and the wider fashion community.
The upshot, according to the Toronto Star, was that a humiliated Pantalone and her mother visited Lim's boutique Champagne and Cupcakes where Pantalone's mother burst into tears and her daughter apologized and asked the store's owner for a hug.
Here's the Toronto Life style blog item and the comments that followed it. And here's the Star's story on the outcome.
Talk about reader engagement.
posted by D. B. Scott at
10:25 am
3 Comments:
No, the Toronto Star story in fact indicates Pantalone "shed no tears" when she met Lim. What a debacle ... one has to wonder about the mores of a developer and professional who would reflexively lie to press twice on such a trivial matter.
At $50 a post, TL doesn't pay enough money for their bloggers to do any proper fact checking. Last week on their food blog they reported that a prominent restaurant had gone out of business when it had actually just moved. Welcome to the new journalism.
the good news is caroline lim has a new brood of customers. good for her!
i'm glad she got the recognition she deserves.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home