Pucci Lavish

It is very possible her full name is Pucrezia Lavish.

Sister of Cosmo Lavish, she is an impetuous, not very bright, no longer all that young, woman. From inference we can glean that she is built like an opera star of the old school and reinforced stage - she certainly has the good head of hair.

It has been said that some women look sensational in black. But a sliding scale applies where for every extra ten pounds in weight, proportionately less of the "sensational" applies. Pucci is yet to learn this. Her attempt to entice Moist von Lipwig into a honey trap for blackmail purposes led to his diving head-first out of the opposite coach window, and shattering the iconograph of the accomplice who was set to take the compromising photos. Moist considered that he'd never before seen such a quantity of deshabillée in one place nor indeed all belonging to the same woman....

She has unshatterable vanity and an exaggerated sense of her own beauty and intelligence which is not borne out in real life. Her brain seems to run multiple threads at once, all of them at varying speeds, and it is not uncommon for her to completely switch tracks mid-sentence because of this. She also has absolutely no idea that the more disreputable practices of the very rich cannot be loudly bragged about in public, especially in front of a certain audience.

Annotation

• For the Borgia connection on Pucci/Pucrezia, see under Lavishes.
• "Pucci" is a take on the fashion house of Pucci; "Pucci" is also a take on Gucci - overpriced designer accessories for the woman with more money than taste, generally flaunted by suddenly rich girl-groups and footballers' wives and girlfriends, and now thought of by the fashion fascists as the mark of the gauche and nouveau-riche. Well, if anybody can buy them just because they've got the money to, then they're not exclusive any more, it stands to reason, doesn't it? It's like the thing with chavs and Burberry... Emilio Pucci's ancestors were wealthy Florentine merchant-bankers and rivals to the Medici, not unlike the Lavishes.
• "Pucci" is also pronounced "Poochie", which is rather mean, although unkind men might well see the joke and murmur "woof woof!" as she walks by...
• Interestingly enough, in Carpe Jugulum, Vlad de Magpyr's pet name for his sister Lacrimosa is a similar contraction: Lacrimosa shortens to Lacci. In invoking a distant echo of the de Magpyrs, could it be that the suggestion is being made that the banking Lavishes are a different sort of vampire family, sucking a different sort of lifeblood out of the system - in this case Ankh-Morpork - to sustain themselves as not-very-efficient parasites. (the sort that don't realise it's in their best interests not to get too greedy and kill the host they're living off.)