Happiness on a string: For $25.99 it’s yours
It’s another red-letter day in fashion when Target’s “hot buy” accessory is the Kabbalah Red String bracelet.
There it was, right on the front page of Target’s website under the “Red Hot Shop,” where items are described as “superfresh + crazy cool.”
For those of you who are blessedly ignorant of celebrity fixations and the latest in hip spirituality, cabala is a mystical branch of Judaism, one that doesn’t call itself a religion, therefore obviating the need for all those inconvenient conversion lessons.
This red string bracelet -- a knotted thread that’s been blessed in Bethlehem at the tomb of the great matriarch, Rachel -- has become an in-crowd thing among cabalists-in-training such as Madonna, Demi Moore, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. It’s supposed to be tied with seven knots onto the left wrist while a loved one recites the Ben Porat prayer. (Tip: Read the Hebrew from right to left.)
Followers believe it will ward off the Evil Eye and its negative forces -- you know, unfriendly stares, unkind glances, envious eyes, looks of ill will. Those are the things, the cabala followers say, that stop us from realizing our full potential.
Hey, I’m just a simple girl, but I’d say that if you want to stop negative reactions, put on some clothes, find men who raise the kids they father, turn off the video camera and stop hitchhiking naked, OK? But who am I to dispute the power of a fashion accessory? Fashion has been raiding cultures and religions for their cool factor for so long, it’s not even hip anymore.
Back in 1993, during fashion’s monastic period, crosses were swinging from belts, necks and wrists like so many lucky charms.
The same year, Jean Paul Gaultier based a collection on the long black coats, fur hats and ritual prayer garb of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews. Gaultier saw the fashion potential in phylacteries, the leather straps that devout Orthodox Jews wear while praying, and turned them into belts. Designers long have raided the closets of the clergy, the Amish, the monastery and the convent in search of something spiritual to give meaning to their work, but as Target has so cleverly reminded us, nothing in fashion is sacred.
Last week on Target’s Web page titled “Some Like It Hot,” the red string bracelet, or bendel, was sold with snappy ad lingo that goes like this: “It’s on the verge. Right there on the sharp end. Soon to be famous and almost too good to be true.”
Truer words were never written in cyberspace. Target ordered the pre-made, pre-blessed packets from the Kabbalah Centre, right here on South Robertson in Los Angeles (and they sold out by Monday). The very same envelope that you could buy from Target for $25.99 is for sale at the center’s gift shop for $26.
The organization’s local co-director, Yehuda Berg, says his group has no control over how Target sells the bracelets.
“The idea is that cabala should be accessible to anyone, anywhere,” he says. He couldn’t be happier, partly because some of the money they make goes to their outreach program for at-risk city kids. The bracelet is one of the leading sellers at his gift shop, and it’s about to get a boost from his new book, “The Red String Book,” which is going to be promoted in October with a giant Sunset Boulevard billboard wrapped in red string.
And yet, there’s the backlash.
On the chat board last week at the center’s site, www.kabbalah.com, a woman who had been studying the teachings for a year asked, “What’s going on?” Seems she heard about Target and now didn’t want to wear her red string for fear of people looking at her “like I am on some kind of bandwagon.”
Relax. Red string bracelets at Target today means out of fashion tomorrow.
And then there’s the messy little matter of Baby Phat designer Kimora Lee Simmons, wife of fashion and music titan Russell Simmons.
Last week, Simmons was arrested in Saddle River, N.J., after police with cruiser lights flashing followed her in her $126,000 Mercedes SL-600 two miles to her estate. After they pulled her over, police said, they discovered a stash of marijuana.
Kimora looks fabulous in her mug shot. And if you look closely, you’ll see on her left wrist a red string bracelet.
Valli Herman can be reached at valli.herman@latimes.com.
