GUY TREBAY - ESSAY


Memo to Brad Pitt: What¡¯s with the porkpie hat and the slacker pants? Are you a movie star or do you work in a record store?


Note to Madonna: time to send the shtick in to the star shop for new brake pads and another one of those trademark reinventions. Eat a cookie while you¡¯re at it, Madge. Lose the leotard.


Advice for Lindsay Lohan and Silvio Berlusconi and John Mayer and Miley Cyrus:It¡¯s a new year. You¡¯ve all been caught repeating yourself too often, giving the same trademark smile to the media; having too many¡°private¡±girlfriend spats in public; and reworking hoary formulas, sad routines or¡°reluctant¡±Lothario scripts to the point where now imminent irrelevance looms.

The time for a makeover is nigh.


This is the time of year when we all make promises about changes we have no intention of making. At the beginning of the year, we embark on mass indulgence in fantasies that, just by willing it so, one can acquire thrifty habits, give up martinis, toss the cigarettes, eliminate the excess weight and finally finish reading Proust. Deep down we know that none of this is likely to occur.


And this is why it¡¯s such a pleasure to dispense makeover tips about everyone and everything else.


The French D.J.Michel Gaubert says new songs of a different sort are overdue when it comes to the substance abuse of celebrities driven to rehab.


Mr.Gaubert says he is weary of the usual drug or alcohol or sex addictions that keep tabloids in business and the revolving doors spinning at rehabilitation centers like Cirque Lodge in Utah or Promises Malibu in California. He would like to¡°hear about other habits.¡±


How about compulsive nail biting, knuckle cracking or pica, the disorder that causes people to eat substances like cornstarch, chalk or dirt?


Perhaps, though, celebrities eat enough dirt as it is, in their roles as vessels for our imaginings about how they might live fuller lives, dress better for that endless red carpet and stop making dumb choices in men.


Take Madonna. For decades the singer has been the billboard image of a shape-shifter, so much so that her makeovers risk seeming overcalculated and stale. Fans with long memories will recall that, before she dieted and exercised to the point where her exhusband Guy Ritchie reportedly likened her to¡°a hunk of gristle, Madonna was a lovable and slightly chubby pop chick with a charmingly clueless taste for ripped crinolines and fingerless gloves.


That, of course, was a dozen Madonna iterations ago. And she surely still has her fans. Joe Levy, the editor of Blender,is one of them.


¡°People pick on Madonna unfairly,¡±Mr.Levy said.


While we¡¯re at it, let¡¯s address Brad Pitt¡¯s headgear issues and the goofy, retro contrivance of a man who is in his 40s, a father of six and who makes more than $10 million a picture affecting a proletarian look.


You¡¯re a movie star, Mr.Pitt. It says so here on the job description. Why not dress the part?


Increasingly the problem for celebrities and even political leaders (dialing Muammar el-Qaddafi) is that they get stuck dressing in drag, or resort to wearing shoes with higher heels than those worn by their wives (phone call for Monsieur Sarkozy) or else turn into surgical case studies, their body parts apparently chosen from novelty catalogues. They bloat their faces so extensively with Botox and Restylane that, on a visit to the Rodeo Drive or a walk down Madison Avenue or even a spin through the TV dial, half the people one sees seem to have crammed soccer balls into their brassieres or chosen their features from a cat calendar.


¡°They had faces then,¡±as Gloria Swanson¡¯s Norma Desmond famously croaked in the film¡°Sunset Boulevard.¡±No stranger to a scalpel herself, Swanson was practically a model of graceful aging compared with the new celebrities .


Let¡¯s alter all that. Let¡¯s bring back inner virtue, the ability to frown and also an aura of serious intention that could become the hottest, the sexiest and the most marketable of visual messages in the new atmosphere of credible change.


Let¡¯s get rid of at least some of the giddy wealth and ostentation, the label dressing and luxury-bag consumption of a minute ago. The days of leaving a giant carbon footprint are behind us. Anyway, as both the year and an era simultaneously turn, that is one makeover myth we can permit ourselves to indulge.