This week Style Fetish takes a toke and rambles on about the stoner styles and influential attitudes of some of our favorite women TV characters who are all about weed. From ’90s UK to modern-day New York, lets inhale and enjoy some hilarious and mildly hallucinogenic life and fashion inspiration from a few fictitious and surreal style icons from television.
“Ab Fab”One of the earliest depiction of stoner chicks/overall party ladies on TV must have been on the cult British show “Absolutely Fabulous,” which aired on the BBC from 1992 to 1996. This classic comedy-duo program features two 40-something besties Patsy and Edina, who party constantly. Their unapologetic and endless joint, voddy and champers consumption seamlessly entwine with friendship, work, home and family.
Patsy and Edina’s fashion styles are hapless and over-the-top: Edina drips with every late-’80s and mid-’90s trend there was – everything a tad too young, too trendy, too tight and too loud. Next to Edina, Patsy is almost sophisticated with her towering-80s chignon hairstyle and pumps with tight body-con dresses. Through the deft costume design of “Ab Fab’s” tacky-savvy styles, the characters are absorbed like a bong-rip. Both ladies are wonderfully fun parodies of 1980s-strength career women and are characters still relevant to a contemporary audience of busy ladystoners who like to get high and manage life simultaneously.
“Ab Fab” has apparently been made into a movie, opening in late July, but watch the series first. Edina and Patsy are the bleary-eyed bad-grandmas of all contemporary, female-produced, post-legalization stoner comedienne genre and show their influence in the work of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer from “Broad City” and many others.
“Broad City”“Broad City” is rife with fashion and style-based visual jokes and the whole show is colored by weed and stoner plot lines and humor of the sharpest, most realistic kind.
The “Broad City” duo show a refreshing anti-style for New York girls – the styles they wear are realistic and neither one is overly hip. They remind me of the “Ab Fab” ladies: Ilana wears skimpy ’80s retro and is overly trendy like Edina while Abbi wears short stretchy body-con dresses for evening reminiscent of Patsy’s.
One stoner style standout was when Ilana wore a dog hoodie as a shirt to her job. It was an honest mistake (though one she’d made before) that she then attempted to make more professional by coloring in her revealed stomach with red marker. This absurdity is high-cringe millennial attitude: Self-absorbed, unaware and makes for perfect comedy. “Broad City” continually contrasts childish inexperience and internet-supplied hyper-knowledge, assumed hipness and actual haplessness.
“Weeds”A sexy sort of stoner style out of TV Land is Mary-Louise Parker’s weed-dealing suburban mom character Nancy Botwin from the Showtime program “Weeds.” “Weeds” seemed to be the first marijuana-based TV show and held plots as tangential, free form and confusing as eating fistfuls of unmarked THC edibles.
Regardless, Nancy Botwin looked fabulous in bohemian, short, sheer dresses with heeled, chunky sandals or retro platforms. Nancy’s silhouette was loosely-cut on top and leggy on bottom, heavily influenced by the 1960s and ’70s. The scene of Nancy stress-stripping after learning she caused her DEA boyfriends death captures perfectly the complicated “Get it off, GET IT OFF” feeling we women can have with our clothing sometimes, high or not.
Nancy Botwin wasn’t a smoker herself but is still appealing to ladystoners as a strong, female anti-hero, the conflicted, drug-flirting, law-skirting type similar to Jackie Peyton from “Nurse Jackie” whose scrubs display harrowing style as the uniform of an addict and Gemma Teller from “Sons Of Anarchy” in gorgeous leather jackets and belts – biker-mama style at its best.
An unapologetic attitude toward style and deed is exampled in all of these ladystoner characters. Modern women who love their freedom to party without judgement, and to live this complicated life in a slightly-altered state can produce inspiration and validation from all of these characters while laughing their asses off on the couch with red eyes and chins covered in ice cream.
Heather Narwid owns Sideshow, a vintage and modern clothing store for men and women established in 2007, now located in Durango at 208 County Road 250. Have a style question? Email her at [email protected].
