While flipping through my May 2011 issue of Allure on the bus ride to work last week, I was pleasantly surprised by something. I'll give you a hint: it wasn't the fucking late April shitstorm that was whirling around me like some cruel joke of a snow globe, crushing any of my aspirations to get a decent tan before returning to California in late June.
No, ma'am. It sure as fuck wasn't that. It was Siri Hustvedt's lovely essay "Dreaming in the Dark" about how she adopted and emulated the styles of her favorite Hollywood heroines. What was especially poignant to me about this particular essay was that she didn't just talk about the fashion of said heroines, but rather about how she would relate to and identify with their characters in the film through fashion:
Perhaps my favorite films are the Hollywood comedies of the '30s and '40s. In those movies, the heroes and heroines are not only capable of finding their way to the end of an English sentence, but they also know how to banter. They know how to deliver a barb, fire off a witticism, and send a wry, offhanded compliment. Their crackling dialogues are inseparable from their characters, characters that are also expressed, at least in part, by their clothes.
Throughout the whole article, I found myself nodding in agreement with Hustvedt's assertions. For her, a silver screen fashion icon is not just someone with great style, but someone with a certain irresistible essence. You don't just want to raid her closet and parade about in her clothes, you want to actually be her. And by her I mean her character. Not the actress herself, but the character she is playing.
Anyway, all that got me thinking about my fashion influences from television and movies. I think that the first person I truly tried to emulate was probably Tori Amos. I know, I know, she's a singer, not a fictional character, but she definitely has stage persona and I definitely wanted to be her. Red hair and all.
After seeing this music video, I totally wanted an all-white outfit.
Super hot while singing about things like monkeys, marmalade, butterflies, and sex.
Pretty sure these pics are from the late 1990s, but I would totally wear any of these outfits today. Although, I would probably add a shirt to the open-blazer-here's-my-tatas look. Probably.
I need this dress. Also, the shoes. Did you know she's only like 5'3"? She gave me hope that short girls can be hot too.
As many of my high school friends will attest to, my "I want to be Tori Amos" phase was long-lived and full of faery wings, glitter, red hair dye and mousse. Around the same time, I was pretty obsessed with another iconic redhead from the 1990s.
You knew where that was going, of course. Who didn't want to be Angela from My So-Called Life? The girls that wanted to be Rayanne, of course, but at that stage in my life I lacked the confidence to go balls out like Rayanne. While I admired Rayanne's sense of adventure, there were times when I felt she suffered from serious lapses of judgment: fashion and otherwise. That is probably why I preferred Angela. She was understated, underrated, sensitive and didn't quite fit in. She was JUST LIKE ME AND YOU. Only better because she got to make out with Jordan Catalano in the boiler room. And the girl knew how to look amazing in thrift store clothing with generally unflattering silhouettes.
One thing I especially loved about this show/character is that they would actually use the same articles of clothing more than once. JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE. The dress Angela is wearing here appeared a few times during the series, and I love it. I especially like how she rocks it with a flannel, combat boots, and black ripped tights, unlike Sharon Cherski who would've worn it with sweet little white tights and a floral-patterned scrunchy in her hair.
How hot does Angela look in her "breaking all kinds of rules, I don't give I fuck, but I actually kind of do" outfit? Unfortunately, this picture kind of sucks, but I love the black slip dress, chunky belt with casually draped plaid shirt combo.
While my middle and high school fashion icons were redheads, my undergraduate years were dominated by blondes.
Kate Hudson's character from Almost Famous, Penny Lane. I watched this film on an almost daily basis throughout my winter of utter depression during my freshman year of college in upstate New York. (I just don't fucking learn about the winter, do I?) Penny Lane was the girl I always wanted to be: precocious, worshipped by all men, but always slightly out of reach, and promiscuous without consequences. She got her heart broken, tried to kill herself, and then just let the guy go in the end before booking a one-way ticket to Morocco, all the while looking super hot and making '70s California hippie chic not look like a complete fuckshow, and demonstrating that smaller-than-average boobs are indeed sexy.
Also, this coat. I spent two years hunting for a coat like this, and when I found it, I truly felt my life was complete. FYI, it wasn't.
The other not-so-natural curly haired blonde who I so wanted to become captured the imagination of pretty much every woman in America from the late '90s through the early '00s.
No shit, you say. Carrie fucking Bradshaw. Didn't see that coming, huh?
For your information, I actively sought out a "naked" dress like the one featured here and in episode six of season one "Secret Sex." Much like Carrie blames the naked dress in this episode for causing her spontaneous slutsplosion with Big, I also blame that dress for the night I danced on the bar at a work party, demanded one of my co-workers come home with me, made out with another one in front of a crowd of curious onlookers, and woke up on the floor of my kitchen around 9am, two feet away from my bedroom, still in the naked dress. When I called my BFF Jessie to tell her that I had woken up on my kitchen floor in my party dress, keys and purse still in hand, she simply said "Who's my Lindsay Lohan?!" I believe Jess is currently in possession of said naked dress, and had a similar night of bar-top dancing whilst wearing it. But I digress...
I really did actually character-worship Carrie in the same way that Hustvedt speaks about in her article for the first three or four seasons of SATC. You know, when she would do actual research for her column, always had a copy of The New York Times tucked under her arm, and listened to her friends instead of just uttering stupid one-liners like she had some rare form of Tourette's that would cause her to blurt out the worst puns imaginable at entirely inappropriate moments. Yes. That's the Carrie I loved. Pre-Pun Tourette's Carrie.
Don't get me wrong, I still watched the rest of the series and the first movie, and I almost made it halfway through the second movie before the "camel toe" reference made my head nearly explode, and I can still quote pretty much every episode from memory, but there was a turning point in the show where Carrie's character got way more superficial and self-absorbed. Luckily, the clothes were still good.
At the end of my freshman year of college, I became totally obsessed with Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind. I think a big part of my obsession with the movie was because I was in a fairly unhappy relationship at the time that closely resembled the dynamics of Clem's relationship with Joel. At the same time I also really related to Clementine's borderline alcoholism and her crazy swings from feeling like "I want to marry this guy and have babies with him" to "AHHH!! He's driving me crazy! I feel trapped!! I need to go fuck a stranger!!" That's totally normal, right?
There was a vitality and spontaneity to Clementine that I truly wanted to embody, and I feel like her wardrobe in the film, including her ever-changing hair colors, really helped illustrate what her character was all about.
Plus, she looks like she gets all her clothes from thrift stores. Now THAT is a look that I can emulate!
"Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours." Love this scene. Love her shirt. Love her hair. Perfection.
My most recent lady crush is a super bad ass:
Nancy Botwin from Weeds is a MILF that I'd like to be. Maybe minus the whole drug dealing and getting knocked up by nefarious mayors and whatnot. I love Nancy because she is super hot, resourceful, kind of fucking crazy, promiscuous without apologies, and despite the fact that she has probably fucked her kids up more than anyone else ever could, she protects them from outsiders like a rabid mother bear.
I also like that she dresses totally inappropriately for her age, and manages to be incredibly charming even when she is completely fucking up everyone's life around her.
Whew. That was a LONG one. What characters have inspired you over the years?
Thanks for reading!
<3-hallee
