Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Regarding perception...

When coming up with birthday greetings for my ex I landed on the idea of the Vuitton logo. But I also recalled how easily perceptions can be skewed. The story goes like this...

Back in 1965 I had a business relationship with the head of the Playboy organization in the United Kingdom, Victor Lownes III. He was a wonderfully colourful figure...  “What is a playboy? It is usually someone who is getting more sex than you are,” he famously maintained... and he was rather rich. And so it surprised me not at all when I noticed that he owned a wonderful set of luxurious luggage. I saw the 'LV' design as Victor's monogram.

Enlightenment came later in the year. I saw the movie The Great Race and saw to my astonishment that the character played by Tony Curtis was carrying in his car a set of Victor's luggage! Okay, that's how I discovered Louis Vuitton, with a corrected perception of a reality which had escaped me.

While I am in self-mocking mode there is another anecdote from the beginning of the eighties. At the time in Paris many of my colleagues in the media scene were of Lebanese origin. My memory is of a drive from Paris down to the Mediterranean... my wife (not 'ex' then) at the wheel... when I was a passenger happy to have the leisure to gaze upon the passing landscape and observe the other traffic on the Routes Nationales.

I expressed, suddenly, that there seemed to be a great number of cars on the road with 'L' decals.

"Funny how many Lebanese there are on the roads..."

Skewed perception! Wife corpsing at the wheel and gently suggesting that the drivers might in fact be coming from Luxembourg. 


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