Mollie Ringwald’s Andie Walsh was a heroine I could aspire to be
BY EMMA MORGAN, IMAGE BY PARAMOUNT
I can’t quote from any of the Shakespeare I learned at school, but I can from the eighties teen films of John Hughes. Pretty in Pink never released its grip. I was badly dressed when I was 15 and saw it for the first time. In my dad’s V-necked jumpers. In compromising white shorts and baggy white trousers. Neon socks. A crimped fringe. Terrible sweatshirts. But I was full of yearning for pretty boys in rumpled cricket jumpers and, confusingly, pretty girls in similarly random get-ups to my own.
Now here was Molly Ringwald playing Andie Walsh, a heroine I could aspire to be. It was her clothes that did it for me, at first. The mixture of used and handmade, the panache with which she wore it all. I had no panache, I didn’t even have any self-confidence; my body filled me with shame, and I seemed unable to dress it. Andie was an adorned princess from the wrong side of the tracks, infatuated with a rich boy with the improbable name of Blane, too busy to pay attention to her much more interesting and nattily dressed best friend Duckie.
She mastered the art of recycling and reusing before it was a thing. Where I came from, charity shops hardly existed and vintage was called second-hand, and we could only buy old things in jumble sales and dusty Army and Navy stores selling ex-military paraphernalia. I couldn’t help thinking that the right clothes and the right love interest would go together – the make-over fantasy which popular culture still feeds on.
By the time I understood that I was never likely to be a good dresser, I knew there were other reasons for loving Andie. She was confident; she refused to change her look or her personality for anybody; she dressed to express herself no matter what harsh words and snide looks the rich girls threw at her. She was a powerful role model for a confused and insecure teenager to have.
Back then there were no obviously queer characters in those films and so I have done my best to rewrite them in my own way. I am still gripped by cross-class love affairs. My latest book has a weird love triangle but gone dark and gritty and queer. I am always refashioning, both sentences and clothes, cutting them up and sewing them back together again. Now I live in Liverpool, home of sportswear, and most of the time I still don’t look quite right. The other day though someone was getting off the bus while I was getting on and they said to me, “I love your outfit. It’s awesome.” I felt the spirit of Andie Walsh move through me at last. And I wasn’t even in pink.
Emma is the author of A Love Story For Bewildered Girls which was longlisted for the Polari Prize for debut fiction and featured on Radio Four. Her new novel Beggars Would Ride is available now from Amazon in paperback and eBook. You can follow her on Instagram @emmamorganwriter.
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