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Recently in Salon People

People Feature
Pick me! I'm a real multimillionaire!
A "shocked and outraged" Trey Parker speaks out on Fox's fumble.
By Carina Chocano
[02/24/00]

Nothing Personal
The odds couple
Who wants to bet on a royal marriage? British bookies find out. Plus: Darva Conger not ring monger; Margot Kidder's fun with mania; and coming soon to a store near you ... JFK with kung-fu grip!
By Amy Reiter
[02/24/00]

Column
Pols, guns and androgyny
A speed-of-light cultural flyover covering McCain, Koresh, guns, Hillary, "G.I. Blues," a heartfelt appeal to the Winslet Brigade, "Star Trek" and, well, you get the idea.
By Camille Paglia
[02/23/00]

People Feature
Alpha male epsilon
Although an exact definition remains elusive, most people know a frat boy when they see one. And suddenly, they're seen everywhere.
By Andy Dehnart
[02/23/00]

Nothing Personal
Annette Bening: Once you start having on-screen sex, it isn't embarrassing anymore
The "American Beauty" star should share her on-screen sex tips with "The Sopranos'" Alicia Witt.
By Amy Reiter
[02/22/00]

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Still, not having a clue is no picnic. As a complete fashion dunce, I'm frequently at a loss, and, like a foreigner in Paraguay, dependent on the kindness of sisters. I simply lack any instinct for what's current and can only base my personal shopping on memorization and what worked last time. As any blind person could tell you, that only works until somebody rearranges the furniture -- and in fashion, that tends to happen a lot.

I never trusted fashion. Random, arbitrary, senseless, constantly contradicting itself -- if something looks good one year, why should it be a joke the next? Such nonsense was not for me. As a child my only fashion hero was Roy Rogers, and, had I been left to my own devices, so he would have remained.

Others have intervened, and frequently. In third grade, I had a shirt with vertical yellow, black, brown and white stripes. I unsuccessfully begged my mom to get me the matching pants. (Another time I actually asked her to give me a bowl cut. Overlooking the tremendous convenience factor, she refused. My mother is a saint.) Later, as long, stringy hair and Yes T-shirts became the uniform of my high school clan, I blithely let my fashion muscle atrophy as those crucial formative years went by, never to be recovered.

Now, in calcified middle age, I need help. And voila -- help arrives! Once again, the catalyst is television -- not only educational, but motivational too! Recently, I was selected to host "@the end," a new Canadian talk show on the CBC's Newsworld channel. Television demands attention to visual detail. Not even the Nashville Network will look the other way if the crack of your ass is showing above your tool belt, so it was time to face the inevitable. I needed a makeover.

The show's producers will be my fashion sherpas, taking on the guiding role that had, in the past, always been played by relatives. I will participate in the makeover too, the way wood participates in building a birdhouse.

My snazzy wire-frame glasses (central to a previous makeover attempt only two years before) are already judged passé. I sit fashionably still while various frames are posed on my proboscis. A striking black pair is selected, and damned if they don't look pretty cool. The process is under way.

From "Charlie's Angels" to "The Simpsons," hair is the most important element of any TV show. The chosen style might be selected for its trendiness or, if you go Ted Koppel, for its resistance to the elements. We opt for hep. The hair artist assigned to my case is a perfectly gelled, goateed wonder. As he works, Joaquin regales me with tales of his hot car and adventures chatting up Salma Hayek in a local nightclub. Maybe he's trying to break the effeminate male-stylist stereotype, but in the process he's just confirming another -- Mr. Slick, the empty package.

My mistrust of style often extended to the stylish. Fashionable people, it seemed to me, were only about fashion. Each of us has a limited amount of time and resources and a person who obsesses about style must do so at the expense of other things, like personality.

Fashion is a tyrant --you must tailor your life to fit your clothes. When I mention to a clothes-horse friend that it's tough to wear fancy togs on the bike I generally use in the city, she suggested simply, "You should take the car more often."

Other issues aside, the makeover process is for a sartorial simpleton just plain frightening. In some ways, it's not unlike learning Spanish phonetically. You can parrot certain phrases, but what if you screw up? There is a persistent and not unreasonable fear that your fraudulence will soon be exposed. Give a man a fish, the saying goes, and he will eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. What will I be when the makeover is complete? A guy with a fresh mackerel -- and no sense of smell. Down the road, someone is going to have to let me know when my once-trendy look starts to reek.

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