Lena Dunham at the Golden Globes 2013: When cool girls get it wrong
Lisa Armstrong: 'Fatally uncool clothes is what happens to cool girls when they have to attend events outside their cool comfort zone'.
BY LISA ARMSTRONG | 18 JANUARY 2013
When I wrote in this paper the other day that I wanted to thank all the stylists at the Golden Globes, I hadn't spotted this picture of Lena Dunham. Or I had, but I'd blanked it.
Dunham is a brilliant observer of modern mores, crafting painful yet funny vignettes into the hit HBO series Girls , from her own experiences and that of other twentysomething New Yorkers living the call-this-a-dream. If Woody Allen were re-incarnated as a 21st-century woman, he'd probably look and sound like Dunham. From disappointing sex, jobs and apartments, she's mined TV gold, especially the sex. A lot of men I've spoken to are a bit spooked by it. Funny, that.
She's also very watchable, without, it seems, much in the way of the usual thesp vanity. She's got a real body rather than the Barbie doll variety. She also has a tattoo. I'm not defending them. Unless they're by Lucien Freud, they seem a bit pointless, what with them having shed any aura of rebelliousness they might once have had when Christy Turlington got a flower scored into her ankle in about 1994. Even those covered in body art seem to agree. The actor Mark Wahlberg has spent the last few years having his removed - and taken his children with him so that they can see how painful the process is. Apparently it hurts like hell. Or if you're a woman, like childbirth. Mind you, those tattoos are consistent with Dunham's disillusioned, might-as-well persona. She even wrote them into an episode of Girls , explaining, in character, that she'd gained a lot of weight as a teenager and having tattoos was a way to feel in control of her body which, however you look at it, is a poignant observation.
But we're drifting here. This isn't about tatts. It's about the monstrous frock her so-called stylist put her in on Sunday night. Actually, I can't believe there was even a stylist involved. In which case the finger of blame is pointing towards the designer, Zac Posen. In mitigation, Posen used to babysit for Dunham when she was little. I think we can all imagine how delicate their conversations over this dress must have been. We can also appreciate that from Posen's point of view, having to negotiate all those tattooed illustrations from children's fairytales that occupy most of Dunham's right arm and upper back wasn't an ideal starting point for designing a lovely ball gown.
But why even dally in the lovely, and in this case, not-so-lovely, ball-gown department? Dunham, as we've established, is no saccharine blonde clone. The none-blonde-none-clone is not always the easiest role in a town that loves sugar and adores blondes. That said, she's recently acquired a cute elfin crop and New York make-up (smudgy eyes, bare lips) rather than the LA variety (frosty, frosty, frosty). It seems as though she's beginning to understand how an actress-come-auteur can look great on her own terms. And it doesn't involve ball gowns.
Until this… well, what? Part dress, part discarded halibut skin?
Fatally uncool clothes is what often happens to cool girls when they have to attend events outside their cool comfort zone. Either they overdo the cool and choose something hideous that only a few diehard fashion bloggers pretend to like (Jennifer Connelly in her beige bandage phase), or they entrust their cool to others, who make them look 40 years older and 30lbs heavier than they really are.
You don't need to be a styling genius to know that cool girls need Kool-Aid, even - or especially - when they're going to a trad event like the Golden Globes. What works is classic drapey, slouchy, hip-looking dresses or trouser suits that aren't trying to be too edgy, and killer accessories - not heavy duchess satin numbers that Barbra Streisand would reject as too ageing. Mrs John West, in a panic about what to wear to the canned fish industry's grand gala would have second thoughts about this dress; the Countess of Hound, on her way to the Annual Dogs' Dinner, would have third. This is a very bad dress, not least because it has about as much in common with its wearer's personality as an Agent Provocateur see-through négligée has with Abu Hamza.
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