I hate to love watching What Not To Wear on TLC. I was stuck with basic cable for a couple of weeks last spring and now I can’t stop watching this horrible, enthralling trainwreck of a show.
If you haven’t seen it, the basic premise is that the friends and family of a badly dressed woman can nominate her to have her wardrobe, fashion sense, core beliefs, and self-worth undermined by the show’s two hosts, Stacy and Clinton, who will then replace her very concept of self with their expensively constructed idea of who she should be.
In other words, they throw out all her old clothes, give her a $5,000 credit limit, and hector her into buying a bunch of unimaginative crap that they think makes her look better.
According to the show’s web site, Stacy graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with a double degree in 20th-century philosophy and German literature, and Clinton has a masters in journalism from Northwestern. These are not uneducated people, but my GOD they are condescending.
That hard part for me to take is that sometimes they are absolutely right.
Some of these women do look like hell. They have tattooed on their eyeliner, they proudly wear stuff they found on the street. But you know what? Stacy and Clinton could be nicer about it. At the beginning of one recent show the victim, a bohemian twentysomething schoolteacher, was wearing a choker she made from an old bra strap. Now, me? I’d applaud her for repurposing an unrecyclable garment into a clever accessory before asking her if she might want to think twice before wearing it any place beside Dave & Buster’s, but our hosts just looked at her in abject horror and then mocked her mercilessly. They also mocked her retro t-shirts and flip flops. Instead of celebrating her personal style and giving her tips on how to make it more grown-up, they dramatically threw it all into a shiny galvanized trash can, pushed her around a few Manhattan boutiques and, after the predictable Stockholm Syndrome transition wherein the victim ceases to trust her own taste and begins to love theirs instead, formerly unique Boho Girl came out looking like a clone of our friends Stacy and Clinton.
The point of this whole post is to point you to one of the greatest t-shirt sites in the whole wide Internet. Reckon prints film and TV t-shirts, music t-shirts, literary and art t-shirts, comedy t-shirts – even t-shirts with German philosophers on them — in sizes ranging from infant onesies to burly XXXLs. Stacy and Clinton would cringe if they saw me, a 43-year-old woman, walking around in a Gilda Radner t-shirt, but you know what? Sometimes a weird retro t-shirt is THE PERFECT THING TO WEAR.