molly and colleen hurford take that and rewind it back to the days of their favorite young adult fiction faves — The Babysitter’s Club, Sweet Valley High — and how the fashion influenced them …
Last week, we covered classic lit and the ladies we love. This week, we wanted to go forward in time a bit, and focus on the reason that both of us got into fashion: characters in young adult fiction. Is it silly? Sure. But I’m sure a lot of girls out there are ready to admit that they went out and purchased gold “lavaliere” necklaces (which just means there’s a pendant on a chain) because the Wakefield twins in the infamous Sweet Valley High series wore them all the time. And there are plenty of 9-year-olds who grew up defining themselves by which Babysitter’s Club character they liked the most.
Our identities are wrapped up in the people we identify ourselves with the most as children and adolescents. And rather than taking a cue from what was on TV at the time (thank goodness!), we tended to idolize the fashionistas that graced the pages of not our magazines, but our library books. And there were a lot. As Colleen puts it, “If I had to choose the most famously fashionable characters from young adult fiction, well, I wouldn’t be able to, and honestly I’m not sure anyone but Molly and I really care.” Admittedly, our favorite parts of novels were when the author chose to express a character’s personality through their clothing. And this was clearly at its peak in young adult fiction of the ’90s.
One of our personal favorites is the immortal Claudia Kishi of The Babysitter’s Club. Then again, we’re willing to be that in a poll, she would hands down be everyone’s favorite. The girl was a fashion icon for alternative 8-year-olds everywhere. She had truly the most insane sense of fashion, always wearing things like telephone cords as belts and plastic bones through her high, side ponytail, a la Pebbles in The Flinstones. She also often featured sandals that laced all the way up her calves, everything that was the best of both the eighties and the nineties were featured in Claudia Kishi’s wardrobe. Claudia describes an outfit in her own words (God, does that girl love to match),”I was wearing a red-and-white striped shirt that hung down almost to my knees, red leggings, and black high-top sneakers. Even though I wasn’t planning on going anywhere that afternoon, I had put some thought into my outfit. That’s just the way I am.” Everything Claudia wears expresses her free, artistic spirit. You know she wants to be a painter, or a potter, or a sculptor someday.
Francine Pascal didn’t know what she was getting into when she started the Sweet Valley series, and she couldn’t have known just how many young women would grow up trying to decide whether they were an “Elizabeth” (stay home and do your homework and have a sweet boyfriend) or a “Jessica” (go out and party with Bruce Patman and copy Liz’s homework in the morning). Let’s face it: No one wanted to be Enid. And she couldn’t have known that the “All-American” blond twins from sunny California would become such style icons for a new generation. For example: “Just then, Elizabeth’s eyes came to rest on one of her favorite outfits, a fancy tuxedo shirt with matching bow tie, trousers and vest.” We challenge you to look in any magazine and not find an example of men’s suits as the new hot trend in women’s fashion (heck, we did an article on that ourselves)! And then there’s Jessica, the slightly — ahem — more “social” of the two. “Jessica chose an outfit that was appropriate for the last day of school before Christmas vacation — a short, forest-green knit dress with long sleeves and a scooped neck — but she did it without really thinking.” We cannot express how many times we hunted in the mall for a forest-green short dress. And yes, when we finally found one, our mother told us that it was entirely too short for school, proving yet again that New Jersey was nothing like California.
An author that never fails to amaze us with her absurdly fashionable characters is Francesca Lia Block. Three of our personal favorites are Weetzie and Cherokee Bat from the Dangerous Angels series, and Violet from Violet And Claire. Clearly, Block has influenced our fashion sense a great deal, which makes sense, since her gritty urban fantasy books essentially depicted early ’90s hipsters, with the iconic Weetzie Bat family chock full of artists, vegans, musicians, surfers and photographers.
Weetzie herself is the original fashion icon of Block’s Dangerous Angels series, and her two children follow in close second. She went from wearing a dress made out of Cowboy-and-Indian bedsheets to being “dressed to kill in sunglasses and leather, jewels and skeletons, rosaries and fun and silver.” And her goal in life? “To surf — along with playing the drums in front of a stadium of adoring fans while wearing gorgeous pajamas.” She’s described similar to Scarlett O’Hara — not actually beautiful, but she makes up for it with her awesome personality and kick-ass confidence to wear whatever she wants. Whether it’s an old prom dress with combat boots, a headdress, or a vintage kimono, the girl has style.
Cherokee Bat, however, is much more of a modern hipster. She is a pale blond girl who runs around in moccasins and fringe. When she grows up she is much more of a fashionista, with designer jeans, high heels, vintage slip dresses, usually in pink. Grown-up Cherokee is pretty much hipster Barbie. Cherokee makes me want to be a blond and put feathers and beads in my hair, unfortunately in real life that can look a little silly. (And yes, that’s a big reason we love the Southwestern trend so much. So we’re lit nerds. Whatever.)
Violet is one of the only characters Block has ever written that wasn’t described as being super thin. Violet is rocking some curves, and she shows them off. She always wears black which is something I am all about, although I have been known to sneak some gray into my wardrobe. Violet is described as wearing short skirts with big black steel toed boots, which honestly just made us want to go out and invest in (yet another) pair of combat boots. She is a sexy metal girl, the type that wears pleather jeans with corset tops and clothes made of plastic, basically she is a badass, and maybe a little slutty.
Of course, while the works of Ann M. Martin, Francine Pascal and Francesca Lia Block are considered well-known, there is certainly something to be said about those books that never made it out of the bargain bins of the ’90s, and those are the ones we love the most. The best one was clearly the Cranberry Cousins series, which began with the book Rival Roommates, where Kathy Manelli and her cousin Deena, polar opposites, are forced to live together in the Cranberry Inn with their mothers, who wanted to open a B&B. Of course, whacky hijinks ensue, but what really mattered to us was the killer description of Kathy Manelli: “Her iridescent fingernail polish sparkled against her knee length black sweater which she wore over black tights. To cap it all off there was an oversized earring dangling from just one ear.” As we write this, both of us are sporting the earring dangling from just one ear, and yes, they are oversized. Kathy Manelli is a punk rocker — she’s a singer in a band — who goes into a bike shop on a trip to town with her cousin and comes out with a bike chain. When her cousin asks if she has a bike, Kathy replies, “No, I just needed a new belt.” Bad. Ass.
Much of the beauty of fictional characters is that they can wear whatever they want because they are fictional. Of course, when we tried wearing bike chains as belts to school, we were told to take them off because they constituted weapons. But the one earring — now that style was solid gold. So think about it and let us know: What characters (from TV, movies or books) influenced your fashion development?
