Scrappy Little Nobody(36)
Sometime during junior year my friend Sam told me that when guys walked into a room, they scanned the girls and picked out who they’d have sex with. He explained that it was like a reflex, so I’d love to get some feedback from guys on whether this is true. Just tweet me or leave an Instagram comment, or if you see me in the grocery store definitely just come up and let me know. When I asked if I made his list, he shrugged and said, “Yeah, you’re always on the ‘I would’ side. I think you’re probably on most guys’ ‘I would’ side.”
This. Was. Great. News. Given the choice, with no effort required, guys would rather have sex with me than not have sex with me? This changed everything! I mean, I still didn’t want to have sex, but you’re saying that if I DID I wouldn’t have to promise to wash the guy’s car to get him on board? The revelation that in spite of my boy-chest and braces I wasn’t considered a monstrosity led to about eight months of really sad attempts to highlight my AA cups and gel (gel!) my hair into submission. Turns out that trying to look as pretty as you can and still not being a pretty girl does a real number on you. My waffle tees were more comfortable anyway.
Audition Closet
Reverting back to my homely-by-choice tactic served me well when I moved to Los Angeles. I’d never seen people this good-looking. I know lots of people say that LA is full of tall blondes who make you feel like Quasimodo’s ugly cousin. I know it’s unoriginal and feels like a cry for attention. But when you’re auditioning to say one line on an episode of Entourage, you can’t help but think, Even I would cast this part on looks alone, then scan the room and regret using your last quarter for street parking.
Maybe I had to compete with these girls at auditions, but I was not about to battle the changing tides of style in my spare time. Boho chic is in, you say? Cool, I’m gonna go buy a SpongeBob jacket from the boys’ section of Target.
My closet looked like the by-product of schizophrenia. When you’re searching for an acting job, you never throw anything away because, you know, what if there’s an audition for a futuristic businesswoman who happened to spill ketchup on herself earlier that day? And if something is cheap enough, you’ll buy even the most hideous garments for the same reason. Your personal clothing is less than half of what you own. And no matter how strong you are, you will end up wearing something regrettable like your “spoiled homecoming queen” audition outfit to a party and take a photo with your friend Lacy where you’re both obviously sucking in your stomachs. Maybe your photos will be higher than three megapixels, but it will happen.
For the most part, though, I was happy with my sartorial choices. I thought I looked cool. Maybe I did. Or maybe I looked homeless. Either way, it didn’t occur to me that adults who weren’t auditioning or on a date could wear decent clothes. I once went to dinner with Aubrey Plaza and when she showed up in a skirt and a little white blazer, I thought, Is she going somewhere after this?
Enter the Stylist
The Twilight premiere was my first experience with a stylist. Actually, he was more a friend of a friend who told me he could convince some less-reputable showrooms that he was a stylist, but he was willing to work for free, so the job was his! He got me three dresses: the pink one was too small, the silver one made me look like the world’s saddest sex robot, and the black one . . . sort of fit. We decided on the black one.
After the premiere, a costume designer friend told me he’d seen a picture of me in a magazine. “You looked cute, you were wearing this kind of kooky black dress.” Kooky? “Yeah, it had a ruffle around the collar and a kind of kooky bell sleeve.” It had a ruffle around the collar? It had sleeves? All I had noticed was that it was a black dress. And it fit me. And it didn’t make me look like C-3PO’s slave wife. I had thought of it as the “safe” option, as a “little black dress.” Turns out someone who knew stuff about clothes immediately identified it as “eccentric.” Lucky for me, he seemed charmed by it. I’d gotten away with “taking a risk” on my first real red carpet. Also, I was the thirty-seventh-most-important character in the Twilight movies, so no one gave a shit anyway.
When Up in the Air was chosen to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Paramount Pictures hired a professional stylist for me. I suspect word had gotten back to them that I enjoyed dressing like a teenager who lived in her car, and while that was spectacularly endearing, it would be in their best interest to have someone help me dress like an adult woman. I wanted to do whatever I was supposed to do to promote a movie of that caliber, and I was excited about the prospect of playing dress-up in free clothes instead of begrudgingly spending money I needed for Panda Express at Bebe whenever I got invited to something.
Since the movie wasn’t out yet, and to fashion people indie films don’t “count,” my stylist was effectively working with someone who had no credits. To be honest, I don’t understand how styling works to this day and I’ve given up trying to figure it out. I think part of the ambiguity comes from the stylist wanting to protect you from the harsh realities of the fashion world. If I mention in an email that I think some designer makes especially beautiful dresses, and my stylist never gets back to me about it, I can assume she didn’t want to say, “No, honey, that designer is a huge deal and you’ve been in one movie that hasn’t come out yet.” So you both pretend the email never happened.