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Picture: REUTERS
Actress LisaRaye turns heads. |
Arts & Entertainment
Janice Breen Burns
When the spectacularly well-upholstered young actress LisaRaye, turned up to the third annual Black Entertainment Television Awards in Hollywood last week, the paparazzi jostled and bumped about in front of her with a modicum more than their usual gusto; lenses trained up, down, left, right, snap, snap, snap.
LisaRaye is a very pretty girl but gazes weren't trained on her face, they were centered squarely on her breasts; 36 double Cs (at least), smooth and brown like mocha latte, drooping under their own weight, and almost fully exposed in the gaping split front of her zipped white shirt. Delighted, pouting, unashamed, she reveled luxuriously in the attention. And, why shouldn't she? She's young, slim, pretty, sexy. Attributes like that don't last for long; she might as well cash in on their pulling power while she can, right?
As LisaRaye swung her girly hips into the awards show, however, (honoring top black entertainers in music, film and television) it became obvious that, among her fellow VIPs, being young, slim and pretty weren't exactly vital prerequisites for wearing similarly skimpy eye-poppers. Au contraire.
The marginally beefier and more mature hip-hopper, L'il Kim, for example, presented an award for best male athlete in several fluttering, bikini-shaped shreds of fabric and a heavy peppering of beads.
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Hip Hop artist Lil'Kim.. |
Apart from the hair (an extravagant mane of Ophelia-style curls; probably a wig), the make-up (a lot), the rings, earrings, necklace and several centimeters of fingernails, that was about it. Elegant sufficiency, by comparison with many of her peers.
Rap singer Da Brat (the names are invariably at one with the outfits) on the other hand, wore a bound tower of African braids on her head and carried a colored tin lunchbox, sweetly teamed with her Sponge Bob Square Pants zipped fly jacket, strategically unfastened to reveal wide-spaced 34 Cs slung in a halter neck lace bra.
Restraint never was a priority among the most exuberant black music and entertainment celebrities and it's one of the reasons teen cult fashions can replicate the style without much trouble.
The rules are simple, defined by an essentially relaxed, and uneducated aesthetic: if in doubt, pile it on. Among boy rappers for instance, it's not uncommon to wear three hats (two labeled beanie styles and a baseball cap on top), three shirts (like Russian dolls, each slightly smaller than the one before), cuffs and wristbands, leg-ties, as much jewelry as you fancy or can afford, and a hairdo no-one else has thought of. Yet.
For girls, the rules reverse: take it off. Or, at the very least, shrink it, and the resulting, exposed breasts, midriff, thighs and bum-cheeks become part of the look.
They do "sexy" so unashamedly, in fact, L'il Kim, Da Brat, and their flamboyant ilk are probably at least partly responsible for the numbers of young women here who have taken to confidently exposing their less-than-fashionably-ideal hips, bellies and cleavage in recent years.
Despite some prissy critics, and those among us who will always reel at the gaudiness of the "excess is more" aesthetic, in fact, it's a liberating leap away from high fashion's often rigid, arty refinements and cruel supermodel idealism.
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Singer LaToya Jackson. | |
