To What Extent Fashion or Makeovers?

Are You About Anything? or Are You Just Using High Fashion and Designer Beauty Products to Cover Up Your Insecurities?

Remember "The Swan"; it was a fascinating show I watched from beginning to end, yet critics could never forget it for glamorizing plastic surgery. Worse yet "Extreme Makeover" ended up being silently taken off the air in the midst of controversy. Women and men were being persuaded to undergo dangerous and often frivolous and vain plastic surgery in the hopes that it would improve their marriages. Sure you can always point the finger at the spouse for being a tool to have to shame the individual to want to change in the first place but were the real celebrities the plastic surgeons themselves?

One of my favorite, yet desperately empty and meaningless reality shows was "What Not To Wear" on TLC. I was obsessed with designer fashion at the time and it was another departure of my daily meaningless existence. Looking back on it the show is more of a shill for mid range designers trying to make consumers out of the fashion victim and the television audience, not an honest, genuine makeover of it's participants. It got to want to travel to New York and go on a shopping spree a bit more than it did to create empathy for the fashion victims.

In fact the hosts of the show were often rude and mean to the participants; seemingly in jest but who really knows how some of these individuals truly take the advice. Most take it all in stride in the spirit of being on television but it is difficult to ascertain what really happened after the fact. These same people, who weren't always wealthy or even really middle class, could have done just as well to go to JC Penny, a discount store or even Khols to get themselves made over.

There were a few degrees of separation; those with more disposable incomes were often encouraged to do their shopping at smaller, more expensive boutiques while the poorer contestants often were in the mall at Bloomingdales. I'm sure many men watched for no other reason than to see Stacy London, a brunette bombshell in her own right that seemed to be able to coordinate her outfits in her sleep. She parlayed that success into her own show; Fashionably Late with Stacy London, which didn't last at all.