Dawn Spinner Davis, DABA Girl and Sad Symbol of Our Times
Yesterday Dawn Spinner Davis came out as one of the "Dating a Banker Anonymous" girls. Today we know her life story. She is the living, breathing, complaining embodiment of the end of the gilded age.
The DABA girls, of course, are the group of mutually reinforcing women who meet to moan and comfort each other (and blog) about the declining fortunes of their finance worker boyfriends, who no longer provide them with quite as generous an allowance as before the meltdown of the global financial system. (They might even already have a book deal!). The Times made Dawn a star of the story:
Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a beauty writer, said the downward-trending graphs began to make sense when the man she married on Nov. 1, a 28-year-old private wealth manager, stopped playing golf, once his passion. "One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35," Ms. Davis said. "It's not what I signed up for."
Dawn graduated from Colby in the class of 2004 and moved to the West Village when the boom was in full swing. She worked for a while as an assistant at Harpers Bazaar, then landed a job at Lucky as an associate beauty editor. She blogged sometimes, and did a piece on putting on your fake eyelashes right at home. It may not have been the most glamorous gig, but it was enough to get her invited to plenty of the sponsored parties where no one really knows what's being celebrated but there's always a photog from Patrick McMullan working the crowd.
Late last year she was laid off from Lucky due to budget cuts. Luckily (ha) she had a fallback: she moved to Miami Beach with her new husband, Brandon Davis. They'd been married in November and were registered at Amazon and Bloomingdale's although the Crate & Barrel registry proved to be most popular (click the thumbnail to see the loot they got). "Before departing," writes a tipster, "she gave the impression around Lucky that she didn't mind getting cut because she seemingly 'wanted to play housewife in Florida and tan.'"
That's clearly no longer the case, as she's now a DABA girl and bored. Update: As a reader points out, Dawn may have been putting a brave face on for her colleagues. Two weeks after the wedding, D.D. posted to DABA:
You can imagine my surprise when, three days before our wedding, he announced that he was going to be a trader IN FLORIDA (Gasp). But what was I to do? The dress was paid for and my high school frenemies were in town. There was no getting out of it (not to mention the L-factor, he may now be a trader but he's still my trader). I put it out of my mind. Even on our honeymoon, I'd only discuss it in the if we move to Florida scenario.
Well, the honeymoon is over. He started work last week. I'm now living in a "no calls-after-ten-because-I-have-to-be-up-at-6" universe. His mood used to be ruled by what house Mercury was in, now its ruled by the home foreclosure rate. Not exactly what I signed up for. I had been working in health and beauty for a popular fashion magazine in New York and had made a career out of having flawless Snow White skin. Where was I going to work in Florida? Would the magazine Ocean Avenue even consider hiring someone as adamantly opposed to tanning as me? What's going to happen to the bohemian chic lifestyle I had been dreaming of since I was a little girl? What is expected of the perfect DABA wife?
Yes, she's had to face a decline in her husband's passion for golfing. But her newfound fame is serving her well. When the financiers were doing big deals and raw money was spilling all over them, their girlfriends, and the rest of New York City, Dawn was able to be employed full time simply by writing about beauty products, advising on the most luxurious of vanity items. When all the easy money disappeared, her job did too, but Dawn rose above it. She survived to complain her way to microfame. She'll do just fine.