Crazy About Tiffany’s

Every­one is just crazy about Tiffany’s, dar­ling! Well, that’s what direc­tor Matthew Miele wants us to believe in his ​“ful­ly autho­rised”, 87-minute glo­ri­fied infomer­cial for the lux­u­ry jew­eller. In real­i­ty, only a few peo­ple get to be crazy about Tiffany’s, and they’re filthy rich.

In this thin­ly veiled mar­ket­ing exer­cise, Miele offers up wealthy white woman after wealthy white woman, all sat in obscene­ly expen­sive Upper East Side apart­ments flaunt­ing their dia­monds for the cam­era. An unabashed cel­e­bra­tion of wealth and grandeur, Crazy About Tiffany’s shows us the insane world of cap­i­tal­ism tak­en to its log­i­cal, lav­ish extreme.

So often, it feels like Miele, who’s no stranger to the world of lux­u­ry retail – his cred­its include fash­ion film Scat­ter my ash­es at Bergdorf’s – is work­ing through a check­list pre-agreed with Tiffany’s so as to avoid any poten­tial PR pit­falls. He’s sure to touch on the brand’s engage­ment ring ad fea­tur­ing a real-life gay cou­ple, while one inter­vie­wee briefly flags up the white­wash­ing of Tiffany’s mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, a notion which is res­olute­ly glazed over.

The film attempts to present Tiffany’s as a for­ward-think­ing, fem­i­nist brand, with Francesca Amfithe­atrof proud­ly assert­ing her posi­tion as their first ever female Design Direc­tor – an unde­ni­ably impres­sive feat. But it’s dif­fi­cult to see Tiffany’s as a bea­con of female empow­er­ment when the depic­tion of women is so prob­lem­at­i­cal­ly nar­row. Any­one with a vagi­na is pre­sent­ed as het­ero­nor­ma­tive, mate­ri­al­is­tic and just dying to receive a dia­mond in a lit­tle blue box.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, much is made of the con­nec­tion with Blake Edwards’ 1961 clas­sic Break­fast at Tiffany’s. But what should have been a win­ning cel­e­bra­tion of the much-loved film soon takes a dubi­ous turn when inter­vie­wees den­i­grate kooky call-girl Hol­ly Golight­ly as a ​“hook­er”. The scene is emblem­at­ic of the film’s cel­e­bra­tion of the mon­eyed elite, so unques­tion­ing that its wealthy sub­jects are giv­en a pedestal from which to mock the work­ing classes.

It feels wrong clas­si­fy­ing Crazy About Tiffany’s as a doc­u­men­tary. Maybe it would deserve the term if it gave seri­ous atten­tion to the colo­nial impli­ca­tions of the jew­eller, made appar­ent by the fact the icon­ic Tiffany Yel­low Dia­mond was dis­cov­ered in a South African mine? What’s more, a cur­so­ry inter­net search shows Tiffany’s is still in the news, only for rea­sons it def­i­nite­ly wouldn’t want any­one mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary about.