essayofthoughts replied to your post “honestly no shade because i’m sure the show is very good, but i feel...”
Yeah it's defs a Theme. fwiw, at least one of the mains - Kristy - is regularly dressed in the jeans-and-jumper combo I remember from my childhood - that kind of solid not very pretty but extremely practical clothing choice.
stoppit-keepout replied to your post “honestly no shade because i’m sure the show is very good, but i feel...”
i've watched the show, and i very much agree with your critique here. I think it's a lot like the Where the Wild Things Are movie, where it was created thinking of the original audience for the books, who are now older, but it also wanted to tap into that present-day 10-year-old audience, too, which made it a little uncanny. Not BAD, it was deffo enjoyable, but it had that too-glossy finish on it.
thx for weighing in, both of you!
i also haven’t seen the movie adaptation of where the wild things are but i’m thinking about the divide even between the hp movies and the fantastic beasts sequels. the hp movies, especially the early ones, were made for kids! they weren’t hyper-conscious of how those kids dressed (when they weren’t in robes) because they probably just wore whatever. can you imagine if they remade them now? the focus on 90s fashion would be fastidious to the point of obscenity, as with stranger things and 80s fashion. and i’m comparing this to the gloss of the fb movies, which theoretically exist in the same franchise (also haven’t watched them though lol) but have the look and feel of something a bit too conscious of the era.
in general i think a lot of 2010s period pieces, especially those set in the 20th century where the fashion is closer to today’s and thus it’s more obvious, are WAY too stylised about costume. it’s like they have to include every single iconic outfit of the era just in case we, the foolish audience, need a reminder. and some of it isn’t even nostalgia - think of luhrmann’s gatsby, fantastic beasts, hell i’d even point to mad men as an early example of this - these are cultures where the people making and starring in the shows/movies wouldn’t have been alive, or if they were, wouldn’t have been conscious of the fashion of the day. and ultimately that obsessive attention to detail - the gloss, as sk puts it - is more about making an aesthetically palatable product, more like a peacock fanning its tail feathers, than about verisimilitude. (contrast this to something like brideshead revisited 2008, or any number of bbc world war 1/2 shows, which i think really nail the historical costuming aspect without getting indulgently pretty about it. in hindsight, this is also something i appreciate a lot about pride & prejudice 2005, though i’m mainly talking about 20th century historical media here. then again i COULD make the comparison to emma 2020 which is like the wes anderson movie of bonnet dramas, so stylised it’s good again, but... no, no, no more tangents.)
so to wrap around, damn i’m glad to hear there’s a kid in jeans and jumpers on bsc, hahaha
