High Heel Stories

Frugal fashion

Imagine the tabloid fate of an Indian actress if she decided to do the same! The cursor-happy clan of bloggers and tabloid reporters who are not known for mincing words when it comes to uncovering celebrity style and scandals, wouldn’t have spared a moment in robbing her and her stylist of a good night’s sleep. Because repeat offenders, as they are called, undergo piece-by-piece analysis in fashion blogs and tabloids of their outfits ‘then’ and ‘now’. With helpful suggestions like ‘Hire a better stylist’, ‘Couldn’t a designer supply her with a freebie?’ and ‘Why does SHE need to repeat her outfit?’ stacked generously in the comments section.

“We have become conscious of brands and celebrity style only in the past few years while, in the US, celebrity watching has been a trend for a long time. Our media, be it online, television or print, have started paying enormous attention to what a public figure is wearing only recently. Earlier anyone would wear anything they liked as long as they weren’t shooting,” says celebrity stylist Vijayta Kumar, remembering how Karisma Kapoor even wore a grey-toned formal business suit and unkempt, long hair in 1997 as she collected her Best Supporting Actress award for Dil To Pagal Hai.

Low pressure area
But even the fierce paparazzi of the Hollywood-obsessed West mended its celebrity-dissing ways post-recession, allowing the emergence of Michelle Obama as a style icon. Frugal fashion had its day in the sun when MObama (as she is dubbed by the tabloids) cleverly repeated her cardigans, dresses and coats on major public appearances during the campaigning and after Barack Obama assumed office as the US president.

Turning from an average first lady to a fashion darling, appearing on the cover of US Vogue and other fashion magazines, MObama had her country’s press eating out of her daintily manicured hands. “One thing that people love about Michelle Obama is that she is such a real life woman, practical and pragmatic. In this day and age, it’s really tacky to think you would not repeat outfits,” said Kim France, editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine Lucky, to a local magazine called Politico.

“I think the fact that [the first lady] re-wears pieces from her wardrobe shows deference to the economy... but more so, it’s normal,” said Mary Tomer, author of the book Mrs O: The Face of Fashion Democracy and writer of the blog Mrs-O.org. “Even in the White House, it doesn’t seem practical that a dress or a pair of shoes would only be worn once,” she remarked to Politico. The Huffington Post also wrote: “While many Hollywood starlets would rather eat dirt than be photographed in the same outfit twice, the recession-ready Michelle Obama makes no bones about wearing the same article of clothing again and again and again.

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Michele Bachmann's leadership IQ

Bachmann will face increasing pressure to modify her views and evangelical language if she wants a chance at the Republican nomination. To get the massive financial and organizational support it takes to win a national election, she will likely have to bend to a Republican general election plan. That plan, dictated by an arcane Electoral College, pressures candidates to make three, poll-tested points and repeat them ad nauseum to cater to the narrow slice of Independents up for grabs in the dozen or so states whose electoral votes might break for either party.  Bachmann will be “harmonized to the middle” and her ideas and idiosyncrasies may be snuffed out if they don’t poll broadly or well with fence-sitting, so-called Independents, who generally vote only for two-party candidates.

If not, soon enough media commentators will start saying that the field should be narrowed, that the debates should have only “serious” candidates (as defined by the media and its polls). Remember how some in the media determined who was “viable” in the past, calling for Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun to be cut out of the primary debates of 2004 and 2008?           

Yes, there will be stories about Bachmann’s radical views, but so what? In the first GOP debate, she destroyed the effort to pigeonhole her as “nuts,” rather than as a real person with principles and viewpoints shared by a portion of the public.  Every time the media paints caricatures of the candidates or the Tea Party, the American people should now be able to say, “Hey, I heard Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul for myself and I refuse to have them interpreted for me.”

D. Michael Lindsay wrote about her unique position as a female evangelical candidate :

There is one significant difference between Bachmann and many other evangelical political contenders that have come before her—her gender. Evangelicals tend to follow traditional gender roles at home, so it is unusual that Bachmann, a woman of conservative Christian faith, is not only running for the White House but also receiving considerable evangelical support for it.

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