Saturday, September 27, 2008

Miss America on "Who are you wearing?"

I'm definitely having a pageant filled weekend, but I am not complaining! This week we gave a disastrous online exam to the class I'm teaching, and a variety of technological problems turned it into a nightmare. That, on top of my own work, has made this a very tiring week. After volunteering at Blacksburg Middle School on Friday afternoon, I was excited to tune into Ellen to catch the Miss America ladies (and yes, my mom and I both saw you, Tara, looking fabulous!) and later into TLC's "Who are you wearing?" Tonight I'm meeting Miss Lynchburg for dinner then we're going to watch Miss Roanoke Valley; tomorrow we're headed to Greater Lynchburg's Junior Miss Program!

Although my mom and I live in different states, we frequently watch pageants and pageant-related shows via telephone, calling over the commercial breaks to chat about what happened during the latest segment. We were both equally disappointed with what the designers turned up for Kirsten Haglund, Miss America, last night. I have to say that I've seen a lot of pictures of Kirsten over her year as Miss America, and she always looks stylish and very chic. Her look is a very tailored one, usually sticking to one or two solid colors in her dresses. One of the designers created a shiny purple concoction with a line of rhinestones around it that looked like something one might find at the post-homecoming sale at JC Penney. Kirsten needed a new dress for an event where she was being honored as Michigan's Person of the Year, and she's Miss America, for goodness sakes! Let's jazz it up!

The only garment that had potential was the one she ended up choosing, but even it had a boring color palette of grayish tan and a strange waistcoat that added bulk to Kirsten's petite frame. I think she definitely went the right direction given the other options. The third designer created an Asian-looking partially lopsided sweetheart neckline that had no support in the bust. It was obvious as soon as Kirsten tried the gown on. The gown also had one of my biggest pet peeves "The waist Batman cape" where they attach fabric at the hips and make the gown half cocktail/half full gown. Someone with Kirsten's figure is the only person who could pull it off, but it still wasn't flattering. Why do designers think that women want to attach a giant cape to our hips? I'd prefer to draw attention away from that area!

It was a great show and Kirsten came across as fresh, professional, and very stylish.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thanks for posting this! I was watching the show last night on TLC and was curious about who won - a long, long, LONG commercial break cut into the show, and it never resumed! I kind of predicted the tan/earth tones/gown + waistcoat would win it, since the two others were either too simple or too over-the-top