“The Real Housewives of Orange County” are no strangers to charges of cultural appropriation and insensitivity, but in recent years they’ve done better.
So when Gina Kirschenheiter paused to ask the staff at a Tokyo teahouse if it was appropriate for them to change into kimonos – the answer was yes – it felt like our housewives had finally gotten past all that.
Alas, they, and we, were not yet in the clear.
On the episode that aired Thursday, Oct. 22, the women head to the Harajuku district, a center of Japanese street fashion and youth culture, and come out with blue wigs, frilly petticoats, thigh-high stockings, furry platform boots and all manner of ribbons and bows, bits and baubles.
Dressed as such, they head for the Shibuya Crossing, the world’s so-called busiest pedestrian crossing, to risk their lives for the requisite photo ops in their Japanese youth-culture costumes.
“Even though there’s so many people, everyone’s so respectful,” Jenn Pedranti marvels at the volume of people crisscrossing the crosswalks.
“When you cross the street in Orange County, you just have to make sure you don’t get hit by a 13-year-old on an e-bike,” Emily Simpson says. “This is completely different.”
An hour or two earlier, the OC wives were in their native habitat, shopping for luxury goods from the likes of Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Birken in the high-end vintage shops of Harajuku.
Gina, in particular, is excited beyond belief as she sees what’s available and how reasonably priced it is, reasonable being relative to the housewives’ income brackets.
“They’re coming to live with me!” she exclaims at a long shelf of mini-backpacks. She and Emily try on the kind of fur coats that would make a PETA member reach for a can of red paint.
Then Gina tries on a vintage Louis Vuitton jacket that costs $763, and the threat of real bloodshed quickly surfaces.
“I need that coat!” Vicki shouts and literally tries to tackle Gina and wrestle the jacket off her as Tamra Judge also joins the scrum on the shop floor.
“Vicki, I swear,” Gina replies. “I spotted it. I’m a savvy shopper.”
Heather Dubrow sniffs at the furor over the $1,000 pre-owned purses the others are snatching off shelves.
“I do not want my bag to come with baggage,” she says. “Maybe vintage should come with a tag, but it’s like, ‘This was a lovely person who fostered puppies.’ I might buy that bag.”
Heather, Jenn, Vicki and Tamra Judge watch Gina buying one of these and one of these and, oh yes, one of these too, and start talking about whether she can actually afford all of this. After all, it wasn’t that many years ago when she was living on more modest means after her marriage broke up.
Now she’s making good money as a real-estate agent, but even so, “the market might change and Gina’s got six kids and they’re not even in college,” Tamra says.
Heather asks the others if they heard how much Gina and Emily spent on a stylist for a photoshoot for Saddleback magazine.
“A local magazine?” Jenn asks as if the South Orange County luxury lifestyle magazine is beneath the housewives’ dignity.
When one of the wives tells Emily about that conversation, she wastes no time telling her BFF Gina what’s going around about her. Gina is not pleased, and at dinner, still dressed in their Harajuku finery, she brings it up.
“Why is there a conversation about how I spend my money?” Gina asks.
“I chimed in and said, ‘You know, the one thing I love about her that I hope never changes; I love the girl that went from the casita to the badass she is now,’” Jenn says in what’s sincerely intended as a compliment for Gina’s bounceback after her divorce.
Gina does not see this as a compliment.
“I never lived in a [bleeping] casita!” she shouts, pointing her finger at Jenn so aggressively that the two white pompons on her headband shake in unison. “I was never poor!”
Gina actually did live in a casita post-divorce, as we wrote about in 2018 when she was furnishing it to move in. She’s even admitted it in past Instagram posts, such as one she posted almost seven years ago in which she wrote, “Flashback to casita living! Glad that chapter is over but I did have fun there!”
Now, she’s insisting she didn’t actually “live” but only rented it for the weekends when her ex-husband came to stay in her other home when he had custody of their three kids.
“The chatter of the universe is always Casita Gina,” Gina says, and someone please let Neil deGrasse Tyson know that’s what those distant bleeps and bloops are saying. “And I don’t like it because it insinuates I was living in a casita with my kids, and that’s not true.”