Thursday 1 July 2010

Isn't it a wonder?


We all have our favourite items of clothing. It could be a Pixar-worthy Hawaiian shirt, a pair of jeans with more holes than the plot of Independence Day, or an LBD that even Monica Lewinsky would keep dry-cleaned.

They're the kind of garments that exist outside of regular fashion trends, so we tend to cling on to them as long as the stitching holds out. It doesn't matter that they might have been all the rage when George Michael was still wearing a 'Choose Life' T-shirt - they make us feel even better than we think they make us look.

It's a sad day when those items finally give up the ghost and get dumped in the clothes recycling unit outside the supermarket. Just last week I had to part with a garish T-shirt that I've held onto since I was an undergraduate - it didn't seem to matter that the only way I was ever going to fit into it was if I started to chronologically regress like Benjamin Button.

So I can totally empathise with Wonder Woman, who has been forced to mothball her hotpants and bedazzled bustier in favour of a more contemporary ensemble. In some ways it must come as something of a relief for the pushing-seventy crime fighting Amazonian. She leads a hectic life as it is, without having to rinse out that stripper gear every night and hang it over a radiator to dry.

It's not the first time that the creative team behind the statuesque star have tried to revamp her image. In the late sixties she was given a contemporary mod-makeover, only for pre-eminent American feminist Gloria Steinem to argue for a return to form, as well as a form-fitting costume.

Several decades later, novelist Jodi Picoult was drafted in to remodel the character for a noughties audience, and commented “One of the first things I did was ask if we could give her breast-reduction surgery, because as a woman, I know you wouldn’t fight crime in a bustier. But I was somehow shot down by DC.” Now you can't say that superhero comics don't address the issues that matter.

So now we get the 2010 version of Diana Prince's lasso-brandishing alter-ego. With "an understated “W” insignia, a midnight blue jacket and a flinty fusion of black tights and boots" she's still the second gayest thing in comics (running a close second after Robin's wank-bank. But at least she can now take down a bunch of hoodlums without worrying that her glittery top will follow.

Anyway, for old-time's sake, here's Lynda Carter in all her sparkly, window-leaping finery...

2 comments:

  1. Fab - she was smokin'!

    i love the fact that her glasses would now not look out of place in the hipper joints of shoreditch

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  2. Fashion is a cyclical beast.
    Love those transformation effects too.

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