Category Archives: Women

Barbie, Girl! The Barbie Fashion Show

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cross-posted from TeenyManolo, because this is too good not to share

How many Barbie-related posts have there been by that title? Surely they number in the thousands, for Barbara Millicent Rogers is the most famous doll the world has ever seen, and in a world of implants and lipo, Ken Paves extensions and MAC cosmetics, what’s historically understood to be the Barbie look is more attainable than ever before.

For good or ill.

But on the Good side of the equation, we grown women can now purchase actual clothes inspired by Barbie and – wait, wait, come back YOU HAVE TO SEE THESE! – they’re actually quite lovely.

For Barbie’s 50th birthday, Mattel commissioned some of the top designers in the world to make Barbie-inspired outfits: Past Barbie, Present Barbie, or Future Barbie, and these, shown Saturday at New York Fashion Week, were the result. Yes, Barbie finally had a full-on fashion show, complete with swag bag. Despite the sneers of a few hardened cynics, the collection was generally well-received.

All photos by my homeboy Kris Krug of Static Photography.

Past Barbie had some snappy, sexy outfits in the Marilyn Monroe vein:

Barbie

Lyn Devon for Barbie. Past Barbie rocked the Black and White hard!

Mystery Designer Barbie look

I don’t know who designed this one but I WANT it!

A classic Barbie Look

A classic Barbie look, and one I could really use for this Thursday. Hmmmm…

Is this Bruce Oldfield?

Not sure if this is Past or Present Barbie, but it’s very reminiscent of early Bruce Oldfield, before he hooked up with Princess Diana and became all about the bling. I’d wear this every damn day if I could afford the cleaning bill, and that goes DOUBLE for the hat.

Moving into Present Barbie era, the colours are softer and there’s enough pink to satisfy even Carey Hart. Am I just old-fashioned, or are the clothes less wearable? Because I do indeed wear a lot of cocktail dresses, but I prefer the kind that stay closed until you decide to open them and whose hems don’t come infused with antigravity devices.

The Barbiest Barbie of them all

Juicy Couture, but you could probably tell without reading. This girl has to be the Barbiest Barbie in the entire show, and the hair and makeup are perfect. But…is she wearing stencilled socks with open-toed pumps? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, I don’t think even a Betsey Johnson Barbie would wear those!

Barbie in modern times

ThreeAsFour, and easily an eight in my book. The Big Hair is just Too Big, of course, but I might dig out the mousse and see what I can do in the way of a modified Barbie Do. What else am I gonna do with it, use it as improvised weather stripping?

It's KEN!

Kenneth Cole did Ken (so to speak). If black tie with jeans is wrong, I don’t want to be right!

Future Barbie needs a blue eyeshadow intervention, but the clothes were imaginative, sexy and generally wearable, if you happen to be an ageless plastic doll whose life is a cross between a Monte Carlo cabaret and a Malibu beach party.

The fiercest bitch in the squaredancing club

You can just tell, she’s the fiercest bitch in the square dancing club.

Cher Barbie?

Bob Mackie. Of course! I love this, it’s just so completely Cher Starring As Crazy Horse Stripper Barbie.

And last but not least, the finale, in which each model re-emerged, holding the hand of a little girl wearing a Barbie t-shirt and a coloured tutu, while heart-shaped confetti fell from the ceiling and digital fireworks went off in the background.

Barbie Fashion Show Finale

This and That: Avatars of Feminine Power

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First up, possibly my favorite painting in the entire world, Rembrandt’s Pallas Athena. I’m well aware that many people think it may not be by Rembrandt himself, but like, whatthefuckever, the painting stands on its own two feet, or would if it had feet instead of a frame. Rembrandt would look at that and say “God, I wish I’d painted that,” I mean, assuming he did not:

Rembrandt\'s Pallas Athena

Could it rock any harder? I mean, really.

Next up, this very 21st-Century image from the Guardian of a newly-graduated Iraqi policewoman firing at a target.

Iraqi policewoman

RIP Suzanne Pleshette. Angie Dickinson, you’re our only remaining hope!

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Suzanne Pleshette

Feast your eyes on this glorious Youtube and wonder no more at whether or not Bob married above himself: oh, he did, baby, he did! This is a clip of a classic catfight showdown of the very iciest type in good olde timey Hollywood style; duck and cover, boys! We blondes have to stick together, but just this once I’m calling it for the brunette; Suzanne Pleshette really knew how to take it up a life-threatening, eyebrow-arching notch. The men in this case are as incidental and interchangeable as chess piece Disney Princes, those vacuous, photogenic losers.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, inspired, I suppose or no, I actually know for a fact, by VF’s piece on Angie Dickinson, and today by the sad death of the original MILF, Suzanne Pleshette (okay, maybe second to Anne Bancroft’s Mrs Robinson, but there can’t be many straight Gen-X males who didn’t have a thing for the divinely sensible and sexy Emily Hartley).

Now, I’m a chick. Been one for years, actually. So I’m used to it. But there’s more to it than meets the eye: when you think about it, women as diverse as Princess Diana and Paris Hilton have managed to become some kind of arche- or at least stereotype. And it pays to type well, not fast or you can get stuck as your 7-year-old self’s idea of a cool chick, which explains the whole Madonna wannabe situation. So when you’re a little girl and you want to grow up to be a woman, what, exactly, do you have in mind? Britney Spears? Madonna? Marie Curie? Isabel Allende? Amanda Lepore? You’ve got to choose your icons carefully, if you don’t want to end up dated by nothing more than your accessories and identified by nothing more than the labels your mother sewed into your underwear.

I picked Pepper.

Angie Dickinson Police Woman

It wasn’t until the seventies… that Dickinson met her pop-culture destiny, playing Sargeant Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson on Police Woman. Pepper was a lot of firsts: the first woman to have men report to her, the first unmarried female officer, the first to display self-doubt and, occasionally, a weakness for Jack Daniels. While she was doing all that, she also carved out a new look for the powerful woman—briskly beautiful in minimal makeup, blond hair permanently tousled from running down perps, her white Bianca Jagger–esque pantsuit adding to her unconscious swagger. Take that, Sydney Bristow.

She was also the first officially-sanctioned over-forty hottie, Dickinson being a young slip of 43 at the series’ start. I’m 44 now, and when I realized that my idol Pepper Anderson was my age, bells rang, the clouds parted, and angels sang the greatest hits of Burt Bacharach.

But only the ones Angie likes.

Angie Fucking Dickinson

“It’s a pleasure to meet a lady who’s a gentleman.”
Frank Sinatra

Unlisted but indelibly a part of this pantheon are Catherine Deneuve and the fictional, yet nonetheless iconic, Catwoman and Emma Peel, about whom I’ve written elsewhere and will link up once I find it.

Am I forgetting anyone?

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the most perfect little rockstar in the whole world

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What do I love about this video?

Everything.

I saw this nearly twenty years ago and had, as is standard operating procedure for me, many sequential and utterly incompatible yet turbulent and hurricane-force emotional reactions. Welcome to my world.

My first thought was: my god, they made that poor little girl look slutty! My second thought was: no, she doesn’t actually look slutty at all, she looks cute. She looks adorable, in fact. My third thought, and here we shall abandon this construction for lo, I am already bored with it, was that it was the trappings around her that could have come with Barfly Barbie, but that by putting this particular girl in there and having her sing this particular song in this particular way the video producers had played innocence against experience in a completely delightful way.

This is not what every 17-year-old should be doing; this is not what every 17-year-old should be wearing, nor where she should be wearing it. But because this is the 17-year-old Vanessa Paradis, wearing a body-skimming cocktail dress, tight enough to show she’s a woman and loose enough to show she’s a lady, dancing in a bar after closing and singing Coupe, Coupe, it is exactly right.

Only a Parisian teenager could wear that dress and a black leather biker jacket and not look like she had rolled a call girl or a trophy wife for her clothes. And only Vanessa Paradis could bop around with the camera doing tight closeups on her bum and still give off a wholesomely sexy Betty of And Veronica air (this was pre-lesbian chic, you understand).

This is, as one of the commenters on YouTube says, the very image of the perfect little rock star. She’s adorable, she’s sexy, she can carry a tune and dance sweetly, and she ended up with Johnny Fucking Depp.

Ah, if I’da known then…I’da got me one of them dresses too!