Where There’s a Sucker Every Minute

They come in four flavors: vanilla, strawberry, orange and cola, and, during the fall ready-to-wear collections, 4,000 a day were consumed, leaving colorful stains on the tongues of the otherwise sophisticated fashion swarm.

Chupa Chups, from the Barcelona lollipop-maker, are just about as common among magazine mavens as the latest Prada bag (which, by the way, is a canvas tote accented in red or purple leather).

During fashion week, more than 100,000 of the lollipops, with the distinctive Chupa Chups logo wrapper designed by Salvador Dali in 1969, were handed out at show entrances.

“One woman took about 20 of them and stuffed them in her Prada bag,” Titti Botticchio said. She and her partner, Antonio Pascuzzi, are known as “the lollipop kids”--they attend all the shows promoting the candy.

With never-ending waits for shows to start, and dramatic drops in blood-sugar levels caused by exhausting treks around town to show locations, the candy was a much-appreciated accessory.

Which is the favorite flavor?

“It’s hard to say,” Pascuzzi said, while sucking away on a cola pop. “But the Italians like this one,” he added, pulling the lollipop out of his mouth.

“I call it the ‘drug candy’ of fashion,” she added, laughing. “Because these people can’t take only one--they take two, three and four at a time. I never knew fashion people were so greedy.”