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Prada sells $185 paper clip, and Twitter can't hold it together

Sure you could just stuff your cash in your wallet and buy a whole box of paper clips at Target for $1.29, but where's the decadence in that?

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
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Gael Cooper

Every few months, a new uber-expensive product surfaces, and those of us without yachts and chauffeurs marvel at the shopping lists of the super-rich.

$425 (£333, $561AU) for pre-mudded blue jeans? $3,000 (£2,355, $3,964AU) for colored pencils? $11,000 (£8,635, $14,535AU) for 30 grapes? 

This time, the item inspiring the jokes is a $185 paper clip (£145, $244AU) -- really a money clip shaped like a paper clip -- from noted designer Prada. Sold at Barneys.com, the item is made in Italy of polished sterling silver. If you have so much money that you need to clip it together, what's another $185 to keep your cash in check?

Twitter could barely hold it together when social-media jokesters discovered the product.

Of course, there were more than a few jokes involving Microsoft Clippy.

Want to save $35? Barneys is also selling a non-Prada version of the paper clip money clip (twisted version also available) for $150 (£117, $198AU).

Or you could just stuff your money in a wallet and pick up a box of 100 paperclips at Target for $1.29 (£1.01, $1.70AU).

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