1:15PM Clem Bastow | There’s nothing we like more than a) serious journalism and b) Girls Aloud, so we were pleased as punch this morning to see the Daily Mail combining the two in some sort of heavenly coming together of everything we love (a bit like “INXS featuring Jon Stevens” or “cheeseburger with fries and a Coke”).
Evidently Girls Aloud members Kimberly Walsh and Nicola Roberts (pictured) took a holiday together, and stunned the snappers on their LA stopover with their ‘opposites attract’ approaches to tanning. To wit, Nicola clearly likes to tan by the light of the moon, and Kimberly is going for that oh-so-special George Hamilton look. Fair enough; to each their own, and so on.
But wait ’til you cop a load of the
social commentary the Mail has squeezed out of this “story”!
Nicola Roberts must have virtually embalmed herself to avoid any sunshine at all. She is Michael Jackson pale.
This is not sun care but sun snobbery.
Just as Cheryl Cole pitched herself a cut above footballers’ wives, so Nicola Roberts is signalling that she is a better class of Girls Aloud.
She, like Victoria Beckham, is aiming for Vogue. Tans are for The Brits, Pale Skins are the Oscars.
Just as very rich people eat less than the poor, so smart women scorn the tan.
Who wants to look as if they have just come back from a holiday?
If you examine the class-ridden Holiday Swap television programme, it is always the chav family who hanker for a surfeit of fun and sunshine.
Nicola’s look is intimidatingly anti-holiday. She would prefer people to think she had returned from a spell in a TB clinic.
She also demonstrates a state of enlightenment, shared by women such as Madonna and Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow.
What is the point of being a celebrity if you cannot conquer age?
And what is more ageing than sunshine? The poor dolt Kimberley Walsh, her bronze flesh on show in a cheerful sun dress and open-toed shoes, is shrivelling up like Michelle Pfeiffer as the witch in Stardust.
Whoa, Nelly! Who would have thought that so much could be read into such a simple act of SPF 30+ application?
Particularly since you consider, as the writer clearly hasn’t, the fact that both girls – yes, even snobbish Nicola – have returned from, you guessed it, a holiday.
We will try to remember all this next time we’re trying to decide whether to leave the house on a sunny day, and if we get burnt at a music festival (etc) we’ll remind ourselves: TANS ARE FOR THE BRITS, PALE SKINS ARE THE OSCARS.
Whatever the bloody hell that means!
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