How Pamela Anderson Mastered The Power Of The Style Pivot

Elle

3 days ago

Something that people often get wrong in the personal style discourse is the assumption and assertion that it is formulaic, set and as unchangeable as our blood type. Really, however, taste – as in, truly personal style – is fluid. It's determined by the ever-shifting sands of our emotions, circumstances and confidence levels.
Just ask Pamela Anderson who is, at 58, in the midst of her most powerful style moment to date – a knockout synergy of Old Hollywood bombshell, fashion-loving art woman and barefoot-and-barefaced eco-queen.
Publicly, the shift really started to happen around September 2023 when she attended the Paris Fashion Week shows of The Row, Isabel Marant, Victoria Beckham and, a house she has had a long-term relationship with, Vivienne Westwood. The headline? She wasn't wearing any makeup – something she continued to do with the publicity tour and awards season circuit for her lauded role in Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl (the champagne Oscar de la Renta dress she wore to The Gotham Awards being a particular highlight).
And is it surprising, really, that she was ready to signal something different with her style? Anderson is a woman who was, for so many years, chronically underestimated, seen as little more than a pair of buoyant boobs. But if you'd bothered to look closely you'd know she was always a whip smart thinker with a social conscience. Even in her pin-up pomp Anderson also always had a good sense of humour which she'd often express through clothes (remember the gigantic fluffy pink hat she wore to the 1999 VMAs? Truly iconic).
Now on the press tour for The Naked Gun, Anderson is currently working with the stylist Bailey Moon. If the Version 1 make-up free Pammy skewed classic, the new-new look has been emboldened with touches of oddity, like the gently amplified silhouettes and subtly tongue-in-cheek accessories (a pillbox hat, sheer gloves, white stockings, mid-century specs) that flirt, toy with and ultimately reframe the traditional design language of a pin-up. Jewellery, by the way, is mostly Pandora – she is an ambassador for the sustainably-minded Danish brand, a meaningful collaboration that speaks to her eco-work.
Va-va-voom gowns are own-the-room impactful without gagging for attention: be it the immaculately cut midnight Thom Browne, Danielle Frankel's emerald bustier and skirt made from hundreds of hand draped bias cut strips, draped chiffon Rodarte or icy off-the-shoulder Gabriela Hearst. Other looks to note? A polka dot midi dress from Haider Ackerman's Tom Ford, caped Ferragamo LBD with deep V-cut at the back, and archival Marc Jacobs-era Louis Vuitton lace cocktail dress. There's a glamour, levity and joy with which she wears them all – and she is wearing them, not the other way around – that comes with the confidence of possessing both style and substance. It's the look of a woman operating at the peak of her powers, living now, not trying to reclaim the past or become someone she is not.
Anderson wrote in a recent edition of her Substack, The Open Journal: 'So much of what I've lived… what I've created—began as a feeling.
A shimmer of something just beyond reach… not quite real, but not only imaginary either.
It lives in the moments when no one's watching and nothing makes sense yet—but you keep going anyway… searching…'
That too is how great personal style begins: as a feeling – not a formula.
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