You are what you imitate

At New York’s Studio 54, long after Liza and Halston had flown the coop, there was still the sacred velvet rope. It lent an afterglow of exclusivity to scrub-faced suburban teens who had been shooed away during more prosperous times but were welcome enough in its declining days.

When the retro-ironic Standard hotel opened on the Sunset Strip last year, the ambience was more democratic. Despite the Warhol curtains and performance-art fish tank, the hotel doors slid wide open into a lobby in which commercial travelers, Prada-swathed models and the occasional bewildered family from Iowa might freely mingle. So imagine our chagrin when, on a recent visit, we found an important-looking lady in a white fur and clipboard standing behind--gasp!--a velvet rope. A barred entrance to a hotel? Even the Bel-Air couldn’t get away with that.

Having talked our way in, we marveled at once-white linoleum floors now painfully scuffed by blocky Italian soles, and the floor-to-ceiling oatmeal shag that looked as if it had fared similarly. Not a year old, the Standard already had the patina of having been launched in the ‘70s, as opposed to just emulating that decade. Indeed, it seemed almost in danger of reverting to its former identity as the Golden West Retirement Hotel. Then again, hemmed in by the clientele of curious teens in leather who reigned as decisively over the Standard as suburban kids did in Studio 54’s latter days, we felt ready for retirement ourselves.