Baby Davidescu and the Pointlessness of Celebrity Best Dressed Lists

This was going to be a standard, run-of-the-mill, pontification about the seeming void of value in making Celebrity Best Dressed lists. Then on Wednesday, December 14th, something amazing happened. My wife, Elizabeth Davidescu, was rushed to the hospital because she wasn’t feeling well and she had thrown up a few times. She was 35 weeks pregnant.  It was soon evident that it would be in the best interest of the baby and the mother to deliver the baby via c-section. As a result, I became a first-time father at 10:08 PM on Wednesday, December 14th. Having the baby the way we did made me really think about the best dressed lists and how incredibly absurd they are.

Let us look at this randomly selected list from 2001. Helen Hunt was number 7 on the list that year. Does anyone even remember that Helen Hunt was named the number seven best dressed celebrity according to People magazine in 2001? Moreover, did anyone remember the fact a week after the best dressed list come out?

To some extent, I think that the lists are all about living a fantasy life that will most likely never be fulfilled outside of the mind. “Oh, look how beautiful Helen looks in that dress! I hope some day I can wear a dress like that and have people gawk over me and want to take my photograph.”

Then there is the flip side to the best dressed list — the worst dressed list. In some ways this is even worse than the best dressed list because it really takes someone who put effort, even minimal, in choosing an outfit and stabbing them stylistically by saying that they have poor taste. Somewhere, a fashion guide may be getting fired because a magazine said that the outfit they chose was ugly.

I can’t help but disagree with a lot of choices made for the worst dressed list. Opinions do vary and mine don’t always coincide with those of the people writing the lists, but with our baby laying in the NICU area of the hospital for the next month, I don’t even think I will be making much effort to think about who dresses well and who doesn’t in the celebrity world.  Real things matter now, and I’ll let fame live on in the vacuous vacuum of its own creation.