A common Slumber Party trope is The Big Date. After many sweaty nights, you finally get The Girl to agree to go out with you, usually through some sort of blackmail or straight-up Bunny Ranch-type payment for services rendered situation. That’s okay. You didn’t expect her to do it for free. You are just some poor, shlubby guy with a never-ending sense of humor, a totally misguided intrinsic respect for women, a talent for something stupid like music, art or computers and you are not blonde. Gross! Step up. She is the most popular girl at school. Everyone knows her by two names like Amanda Jones, Cindy Mancini, or Blane McDonnagh, and she is really good at doing things like talking to her friends, cheer-leading and being a bitch. I mean come on!
Like most Slumber Party tropes, The Big Date is filled with its share of Fashion Victims and Victors. Here are my picks:
In Some Kind of Wonderful, when the terminally ginger-haired Keith finally picks up the one-and-only Amanda Jones* for their Big Date, a date he literally mortgaged his entire future for, I’m sure he expected her to be dressed like the flawless princess she was…or at least like she was being paid to be on a date. But no. After spending a lot of time looking in the mirror, super-gluing her mullet into the perfect helmet-like shape and refusing to put on make-up, AJ showed up looking like a bank teller from Oklahoma.
VICTIM
You are taller, more beautiful and a better dresser than me, but I’m the most popular girl in school? Even I don’t get it.
The weird thing is that Keith hired a hot heterosexual-yet-androgynous drummer to dress up like Morris Day’s chauffeur and drive him around, but somehow couldn’t keep his eyes off Miss Helmet Hair.
VICTOR!
In Can’t Buy Me Love teen McDreamy proves that he can buy love when he offers to pay Cindy Mancini (yes THE Cindy Mancini) the 1500 dollars to have the worst outfit in Big Date history cleaned after the Big Man on Campus spilled pretentious wine on it.
VICTIM
I don’t know which is worse–that it is all ivory suede, that it is fringed, that it is three pieces, and not one of those pieces is a shirt, that it would cost 1500 dollars to clean, or that she borrowed this slutty monstrosity from her MOTHER. Ew.
I think the stain is an improvement. Wait. Are those feather earrings? Holy hell.
In Pretty in Pink, Andie Walsh finally breaks through the stigma of being super cute and having lots of cool friends to actually land a date with the oh-so bland Blane McDonnagh. She of course decides to make her own dress! Spunky! The only problem is that she ends up looking like she ran into Dr. Shrinker on the way to the prom and had to wear something from Barbie’s Disco Queen collection. Spelunky….
VICTIM
I don’t know what is sadder–that Molly Ringwald’s nipples seem to be psychically forecasting Anne Hathaway’s recent Oscar dress controversy, or that if she had just worn Annie Pott’s adorably out-of-style dress as is, she would have been named the Victor! …Even with the fluffy yellow slippers.
Victor!
*As long as you don’t Google her name or look it up in the phone book.
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