A couple of weeks ago I bought a Le Bag tote on eBay. I don’t know if you remember Le Bags but they had a moment in the late 70s and early 80s:
I chose my Le Bag (fairly plentiful, reasonably priced, exclusively vintage) over an Esprit tote (fewer and farther between unless you want a new knockoff, more expensive) even though the latter is what I desperately wanted in middle school. Unfortunately, my parents bought me an LL Bean backpack sometime around 1986 that lasted through my college career and could not see the sense in buying another bag of any sort. I was spending all my babysitting money at the Express sale rack so, I was stuck with LL Bean into the mid 1990s.
I love the Le Bag, and it almost fills the hole created by my fashion nostalgia white whale, the Jordache crescent bag:
I had a purple one and am not sure what happened to it, though it seems likely it fell apart as they were not terribly well made. I have been mystified as to why I’ve never been able to find one of these on the internet – until recently when I learned that sometime around 2010, someone found a whole bunch of dead stock Jordache crescent bags and sold them on Etsy and eBay, and they were all immediately bought up and apparently hoarded from that time forward. Alas!
In any event, as I trawled cyberspace’s great garbage sale in search of bygone trends I wasn’t allowed to have, I unearthed a memory from my teenage humiliation bank that I would like to share with you.
Get excited!
When I was about 13, my mother signed me up for Seventeen Beautyworks, a sort of bargain-basement finishing school that I’m sure was mainly intended to sell Clearasil, Aussie Sprunch Spray, and Caboodles (I need the internet to know they are CABOODLES not “kit and caboodles,” show some respect). The class was held in a disused portion of the O’Neil’s department store at the mall. I attended one evening a week for several weeks, along with the daughters of two of my mom’s friends.
The other girls were a year or two younger than me and were close friends. I knew them of course but did not really hang out with them, plus I was very awkward and uncool while they were sort of popular-lite. They also had a habit of speaking to each other exclusively in whispered inside jokes and a sort of secret nonsense baby talk language and then giggling behind their hands. They were annoying, but had the upper hand because they outnumbered me.
Of the three of us, I was really the only one who needed help with stuff like hair and makeup. I was interested in these things but my mom was more sensible than fancy. She once gave me a lipstick “so you don’t look like a corpse” and that was really the extent of me learning feminine wiles at my mother’s vanity table.
At the time there was of course no YouTube to show you how to successfully put on teal Bonne Bell eyeshadow and not look ridiculous. Plus I didn’t have a lot going for me to begin with: I was chubby and had braces and Holly Hobbie brand glasses from the JC Penney optical department. The wildest thing I’d ever done fashion wise was stick a small holographic heart sticker in the bottom corner of one of the lenses, something I’m sure I got in trouble for.
My mom really did try! Before my first year of high school she handed me the August 1987 issue of Seventeen* and told me to go through it and decide what clothes I liked and wanted to wear. Well, I liked all of it. I liked the outfit on the cover:
I liked all of these:
And I became thoroughly convinced I needed a crested blazer to survive:
Even though the average girl at my school looked a lot more like this KMart ad:
Anyway I couldn’t get any of that stuff because our household back-to-school clothing budget did not include Benetton shirts and Ralph Lauren kilts. My mom was about 10 years older than all of my classmates’ parents and her idea of acceptable outfits for young ladies did not extend to stirrup pants and off the shoulder neon sweatshirts. Anything I had that was remotely cool, like my flowered jeans and shaker sweaters, were things I’d wheedled my dad into buying when I tagged along on trips to Sears for tools and lawn equipment.
My friends were a lot different in this regard. Laura’s mother went to cosmetology school and always made sure Laura’s hair and makeup was perfect. My friend Andrea’s mother just handed her the J.Crew catalog and let her fill out the order form, after which she’d write a check and send it off. (I tried this with my mom and she was like “I don’t know where you get your ideas.”) When my friend Gretchen from church wanted to wear makeup, her mom took her to the Clinique counter and told the saleswoman to recommend what she should buy, and then she bought those things. My mom simply thought all of this was unnecessary!
So: I am guessing the Beautyworks class was an attempt to help me out when it came to navigating my awkward years.
BREAKING NEWS!!!!, it did not work.
I have tried many times over the years to unearth vestiges of Seventeen Beautyworks online, with little success. I did find this on eBay:
And while I think this dates to the 70s or early 80s, it is pretty similar to the notebook I received at the class. Mine was Barbie pink, though.
Our instructor Elodie was nice, very tall and thin, and now looking back from my advanced age I would guess she was probably not older than 23. She might have been a model? Locally, I mean, for department store circulars and such. The thing I remember most from all of her sage advice was when she told us that she would do her hair and makeup before getting dressed, and then, if she was wearing a pullover, would put a silk scarf over her head so as not to mess up her hair or face. I filed this tip away as the kind of knowledge I’d certainly need to have as a sophisticated grown woman, but I have never used it once.
There were probably 10 or 15 girls in the class, and the only one I remember was the one my pseudo-friends and I called Miss Pageant. She appointed herself a sort of TA to Elodie because, you see, she already knew all of this stuff. I am not sure why she was even in the class unless it was just to make everyone else feel inadequate, which she did at every possible opportunity.
I don’t remember a lot of the class content specifically, with the exception of the week we learned about posture and, horrifyingly, how to walk on a runway. We practiced the runway walk in a group and then Elodie proposed a chilling game in the manner of the Saw movie franchise: we would do our walks individually in front of the whole class and then the class would rate us from one to ten.
I had flop sweat immediately. I tried to disappear into the colorless beige walls and carpet of whatever long-decommissioned department we were tucked into. Bridal and formal? Toys? Cutlery? I couldn’t imagine, I just knew that my physical death due to terminal embarrassment was imminent. I wondered if, when they reported it on the news, they’d show Miss Pageant in a man-on-the-street style interview, describing how terrible I’d been at walking.
The other girls all did their walks, with varying success. Miss Pageant was a unanimous ten. Unsuccessful at making myself invisible, I had to take my turn, and I was very bad. My nerves overrode all of my fine and gross motor function and I fumbled the ball very hard. When I finished there was silence until Miss Pageant blurted out my rating: “THREE!” followed by peals of laughter, including from my two pseudo-friends, which did not surprise me but did also not feel great.
Of course, I laughed too, because when you are the joke you have to pretend to be in on it.
The next week before class, I had a haircut at the Red Carpet salon, another one of my mom’s attempts to help me out. My friend Tami’s mom had recommended it to her, and I am not sure why this seemed like a good idea because Tami’s hair was terrible. I always tried to tell my stylist Tonya how I wanted my hair to look, with the result that I got very bad haircuts and Tonya ratted me out to my mom for using too much hairspray.
But on this particular night I was determined to succeed. I had grown weary of the Beautyworks class and Miss Pageant and even Elodie, and I needed to earn back some of the social capital I’d lost the previous week. I wrote down a detailed description of the haircut I wanted (which to the best of my memory was a curly bob like Debbie Gibson’s, even though there was no haircut on earth that would have made my own fine and flyaway hair look like that). I’d get my new cool haircut, which would fix everything about me forever. I’d go immediately to Beautyworks and everyone would forget all about my disastrous runway walk.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that nothing went as planned. Tonya gave me a terrible haircut – a boy’s bowl cut, for lack of a better description – and I couldn’t get out of the salon fast enough. I got in the car with my mom, who’d left to run an errand, and made it clear I would not, could not, show my face at that stupid mall class of mean girls.
My mom was usually very strict about things like showing up when and where I was expected. She had a habit of signing me up for all kinds of weird stuff like summer rec league softball or Saturday morning Latin classes, and once the money was spent there was no getting around it, I was going. But every now and then she was real cool about something, like calling me off of school and letting me sleep in on a random day, or, in this case, taking my word for it that I simply could not be made to go learn about how to properly apply foundation. She simply said “all right, you don’t have to go” and drove me home.
Sadly there was no good solution for my hair, it was just horrible more or less until high school. Actually I’ve never been good at doing much of anything with my hair so this, at least, is very true to my essential nature.
I hope the reason I can’t find many relics of Seventeen Beautyworks is that everyone threw away their dumb pink notebooks. I also wonder what Miss Pageant is doing, although I think the likely answer is anti-seed-oil almond mom content on TikTok. But who knows, maybe she’s a dirty hippie. Stranger things have happened. And somewhere out there is Elodie, close to retirement, pulling her sweaters on over her scarf-draped head.
*”It’s where the girl ends and the woman begins” HORRRRRKKKK