Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [49]
And yet, in this state, I wanted people to see me as beautiful. I don’t care how many times Demi Moore or others pose naked while pregnant on the covers of major national magazines. I don’t care how many women take casts of the babies in their bellies, or coo longingly over newborn clothing at the Gap while being filmed for A Makeover Story’s companion show, A Baby Story. Pregnancy isn’t pretty—for me, at least—and it sure as hell isn’t sexy. If you’re in any fundamental doubt about this, ask any pregnant woman who has had the misfortune of taking a subway while, say, eight months pregnant and ask her how many men have offered her a seat on a crowded train car—or even glanced in her direction.
Women on makeover shows don’t throw up in toilets. Or in bowls placed next to the couch they’re resting on. Or in sinks. They don’t gag in the street when walking their child to and from nursery school. They aren’t too tired to show up for their makeover. They don’t suddenly gain weight in odd and uncomfortable ways.
Makeovers, I decide, are my version of the sweet life. A Makeover Story led to Ambush Makeover, which led to home makeover shows like Designers’ Challenge and Landscapers’ Challenge and Trading Spaces, where best friends or neighbors are given an opportunity to redo a room in each other’s homes. (Helpful Hint from Helaine: Letting your pals give your home a makeover on a low budget is not conducive to long-term friendship.)
Those led to What Not to Wear.
What Not to Wear began life as a BBC production in 2000 with two fantastically sarcastic hosts, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, who specialized in giving frumpy British women from the hinterlands new, fashionable lives. It was a monster hit in Britain, and a cult sensation on BBC America.
What Not to Wear is the anti–Makeover Story. It’s not—at least at first viewing—a heartwarming show. Friends do not appear together, preparing for a special event. Instead friends fink each other out—to Stacy. They write in, begging Stacy and her co-host (first Wayne Scot Lukas, then Clinton Kelly) to take on their loved ones and fix their fashion sins. “Mom dresses like it’s still 1979,” some ungrateful daughter might say. “And that’s when she doesn’t look like an unmade bed.” The voice-over narration will take it to another level: “Susie thinks she looks like a Dancing Queen,” it will intone. “But in reality, she’s a one-hit wonder that never was from another era that’s best forgotten.”
The What Not to Wear crew stalks their unknowing victim for two weeks, filming them in the unpardonable acts of wearing baggy T-shirts, leopard-skin prints, rainbow-striped leggings, and assorted fashion disasters before confronting them with the videotaped evidence of their inappropriate awfulness.
Helaine leaves the house only to take her son to nursery school or to pick up more french fries at McDonald’s, but that’s no excuse for dressing like a welfare mom waiting for her next check. She’s wearing a ten-year-old, vomit-stained, ripped flannel Lanz nightgown left over from her college days, with pregnancy leggings from Bloomingdale’s that are too long for her petite frame under her eight-year-old coat.
I loved it. I thrilled as Stacy and her co-host went through her victim’s wardrobe in front of the unforgiving 360-degree mirrored dressing room the show would become famous for, making nasty comments about her hapless subjects’ favored outfits. “Are you seeking the lead role in Auntie Mame?” she might ask as she tosses a pair of mules with pink fuzz froufrou on them straight into the garbage. “Why would you buy this?” she’d shout as she added a sweatsuit