Naturally Zeitgeist

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

The collective on-line fashion site from Condé Nast is called “style.com”. And while I might argue about the wisdom of their losing their CN brand identity under such a masthead, it is undeniably consumer-easy. Click on www.style.com, and you see what the professional culture of Fashion and Beauty is talking about right now.

That’s why it was such a zeitgeist-surprise when, just days after we posted my last blog entry – with the Charlie Girl ad so prominently featured, a headline on their website caught my eye. The Charlie Girl’s Back, it read. And the story featured the idea that the soft, sleek, natural looking make-up we used in the 1970’s Charlie Fragrance campaign was back in style on the runways and in the fashion books.

The feature tells you how to get the look for yourself, piece by piece. But the idea behind its resurrection interests me even more. There may be a lot of art in looking like a million, while looking as though you’re not trying – but that was the message of the New Women of the 1970’s. There was no status in actively, apparently or obviously trying to get men to notice them. Women needed to be naturally terrific. Their hair should appear naturally beautiful, thick, shiny and soft. Their skin should look naturally dewy, not masked with powder or paint. And most of all, it should look effortless. The color of the lipstick used in this piece says it all: Freckle.

I hope it’s a good sign. I hope it means that the moment of the street-walker fashion and the six-inch-drag-queen-heel and the Girls Gone Wild behavior is coming to the end of its rope. Not that I didn’t appreciate some of the flash and wit of it, but a culture that confuses applied layers of sex, with style, doesn’t strike me as a healthy bit of self-expression -- for women or men. But I’m naturally optimistic.