The Skirt Locker

As the U.S. economy tries to unshackle itself from lagging indicator after lagging indicator, this seems like just one indignity over the line: Tinsley Mortimer, the prefab Manhattan socialite whose frothy vacuity all but embodied the self-regarding elan of the new millennial money culture, has grown “edgy.”

That’s the worrisome verdict delivered by Wall Street Journal fashion hand Ray Smith, at any rate, who conducts on a sobering tour of La Mortimer’s closet in West Chelsea, supplying a chilling account of What It All Might Mean. The Virginia-bred socialite has, you see, been “going through an emotional time-spurred by her separation from her investment-banker husband Topper a year ago and the intense scrutiny” that accompanies the debut of her CW reality show later this month. Why, just the rumors of a feud with rival socialite-cum-brand-magnet Olivia Palermo, featured already on her own reality franchise, MTV’s “The City,” sends fresh charges and countercharges of cynical hype pinwheeling through the confected uptown social scene. Is it any wonder then, that our ingenue has ventured into the dark and brooding netherworld beyond “her trademark pastel-and-ringlets look”?

Since the Topper alliance thudded to Earth, Smith notes, Mortimer “is settling into a large loft apartment in West Chelsea that she moved into last September, where she lives alone and is concentrating on building her career. While she’s brought with her a number of the brightly colored baby-doll dresses and Mary Jane shoes that she’s known for, her closet now includes much darker fare, like skin-tight Hervé Léger bandage dresses.” The sight of Mortimer idly caressing one such ebony frock is our own age’s equivalent to the Dorothea Lange portrait of the careworn migrant farm mother -it’s every bit as jarring as coming across a Jonas Brother nodding out in the midst of a heroin jag.

No less a shock awaits us when our perky blueblood pixie waxes confessional about her transformation. It all started, apparently, with a seductive gateway drug-namely “a pair of strappy, chunky Azzedine Alaïa heels” the thrill-mad Mortimer purchased back in 2008. “It was my first time not doing [my look] with a little Mary Jane like I usually do it. It felt aggressive and a little big for me. It helped me transition into chunkier shoes.”

From there, of course, it was a chunky, strappy slide down a familiar slippery slope. There were, for instance, the Samantha Travasa bags Mortimer designs for the Japan market; the fall 2009 collection featured “fringe, a funkier contrast to the more dainty bags she had designed before,” Smith writes in a tone of barely concealed horror.

And by now, everything about the Mortimer ensemble translates clearly as a cry for help. Read on, if you dare:

“I’m a girly girl but I’m having a bit of a slightly edgy phase,” she said, wearing a sleeveless black and white ombre wool tulip dress with a front zipper by Graeme Black on a recent afternoon. She capped off the dress, which fell just above her knees, with severe, black Christian Louboutin lace-up booties, a wide black studded belt and chunky studded bracelets and cuffs. The fashion house lent her the dress to wear at the designer’s show during London Fashion Week last September and let her keep it, as well as a matching coat.

Sleeveless black! Lace-up booties! More chunky accessories! And worst of all, charity swag! What could be a bigger blow to the frail self-esteem of a former high priestess of the social set who could once claim a chunk of the Standard Oil legacy? All this set piece needs, clearly, is for Mortimer’s homestate social-climbing allies the Salahis to drop by, perhaps with an opium dealer in tow, to permanently seal the dark tabloid degradation of this former star of the first magnitude.

Then again, we all should have seen it coming. Doesn’t the vision of ringlets and pastels bedecking a notionally mature American adult amount to the same exercise in delusional wish fulfillment that one finds lurking in the higher math of a credit default swap? Isn’t the fancy that one can solider into one’s thirties as a “girly girl” the life-cycle equivalent of the dogmatic conviction that housing values will never decline? Just hearken to La Mortimer’s envoi, a whiff of nostalgia evoking that magical time when she, like all America, was beguiled by the dream of a perfect, if desperately overleveraged, existence:

She recalled the time in her life when her style had to be rigidly consistent. She darted to a purple, flower-print Marc Jacobs halter ruffle wrap dress that has a folk-hippie vibe. “I bought it to wear at one of the little events before my wedding [in 2002], like a day lunch,” Ms. Mortimer said. “I felt stylish when I bought it. It was probably one of the first dresses that I put some real money into it. I justified it because it’s for my wedding and everything had to be perfect.”

Now, of course, Mortimer finds herself pursuing the opposite of perfection in the public eye. As of March 10, she’ll be marketing her brand as a lurid case study in monied squalor-even if the absinthe-fueled catfights she’s bravely mounted before the reality-TV cameras are largely fake. There’s no doubt a lesson there for the rest of us, too-self-abasement, however insincerely choreographed, being the new reputational currency in a bailed-out social order.

Perky blueblood pixie Chris Lehmann is also having a bit of a slightly edgy phase.