The overbearing conspicuous consumption, the saccharine personalities, the culture-less spread of beach bums and wannabes.
That is one way of saying that, in a generational field of highly professional but generally uninspiring fashion personalities, Ben Cho is conspicuous for his iconoclasm and cool.
What private equity executives and investment bankers say about the emerging leaders is that, as a group, they lack the founders' outsize personalities and tendency for conspicuous consumption that at times have hurt the industry's image.
Each of the five characters here arrives with a Personality and a Problem, both as conspicuous as a gaudy necktie, and it's not hard to predict the conflicts that will arise and the symmetry with which they will be presented.
Gates and Ballmer, friends since they met as undergraduates at Harvard in 1974, have opposite personalities, except for one trait very conspicuous in both: competitiveness.
Lowell's vivid and powerful personality and her independence and zest made her conspicuous, as did her scorn of convention in such defiant gestures as smoking cigars.
It is not surprising that in a city known for its outsized personalities, many of these projects involve New York's most conspicuous developers.
These days, however, Broadway's most conspicuous malady seems to be less its economic vulnerability -- though that certainly remains a concern -- than a severe personality disorder.
Conspicuous consumption is out.
