There’s this woman who shows up on Larry King from time to time — maybe all the time, seeing as I don’t watch it often. She’s some sort of Republican talking head. She’s got perfectly-coiffed bright-red hair and a ton of perfectly-placed makeup on her surgically-manipulated face. She has to be a lot older than me, but she’s trying her best to look like someone in their twenties and living in the 1950′s. Just looking at her creeps me out. Then she opens her mouth, and it makes my skin crawl.

Recently, they were discussing the money the RNC spent making their VP candidate pretty, and she went off on how Michelle dresses, in particular, the dress she wore when she was on The View. She went on and on about that dress and how it was by a designer from Chicago who is so exclusive she’s seen by appointment only. How elitist!!!

Not that I particularly care who is wearing what or how much they spend on it, but the crap she spewed was so stinky, I have to point out some facts, and thanks to MSNBC, I don’t have to do the research and write a whole post about it. They have done it for me. I think this one quote, from the designer herself, sums it all up best:

“I’m very happy. I’m very surprised. I had no idea she would be wearing this dress,” Ricco told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Friday in New York. “But it’s sort of a natural happening for me, because I’ve been designing dresses a long time. We ship a lot of dresses to the stores, and I’m happy that Michelle chose this dress to wear on ‘The View.’ ”

“It is,” the designer agreed. “I put a lot of time and effort into making these dresses fit a lot of American woman. I think to be able to go into the store, for Michelle to find the dress, try it on, love it, and to be able to just wear it, speaks to what I’m doing every day.”

So, Ms. Ricco is a clothing designer who has more than one store, and Michelle bought the dress in a store. It was not created just for her, nor were any private appointments involved. The designer has apparently never even met Michelle, and even more interesting is that the dress only cost $148. It is, in fact, only a designer dress in that it isn’t mass produced on the scale of things sold at Target. It is produced by a small business owner, and her business is booming, because everyone wants that dress … and they can have it for a mere $99. Yup, that sounds like an exclusive designer to me, right?

I also have something to say concerning “appointment only” clothing designers. I would say that designing clothing for people by appointment only is both the lowest and highest rung on the fashion ladder. Designers do not go from deciding they want to be clothing designers to having togs hanging in boutiques or chain stores. They almost all start out taking appointments, sewing for friends and friends-of-friends, getting their name out there, and then with luck, they may get to sell things in a boutique. At the other end of the spectrum, once they survive all the hell and become so well-known they are a household name, then they can return to taking appointments and doing exclusive work. The difference is the mostly unknowns make far, far less money.

I know, because for five years, designing clothing for people by appointment only was my side-job. I could have even described myself as exclusive. I did turn people down. Why? Because there was exactly one person working in my sweatshop, and she had a full-time job managing a fabric store. Time was always tight, and so was money. I don’t think I ever slept. I wasn’t doing it to launch some kind of career in fashion. I never went out and promoted myself or tried to progress beyond sewing in my living room for people who heard about me by word-of-mouth. But … that’s exactly how clothing designers get their start, and being appointment-only doesn’t make them exclusive or even expensive. It isn’t until they get to the end of illustrious careers that “appointment-only” holds any kind of exclusivity meaning at all, and the fact is, it still boils down to one person only having so much time for appointments … no matter how much they are getting paid or how large their staff is.

Which is all beside the point, seeing as the dress was bought in a store for $148 and can still be bought in stores, making it neither expensive or exclusive. And buying an off-the-rack dress in a boutique for a special occasion hardly makes one an elitist snob.