Pussycat Dolls

I guess Kimberly Wyatt here is one of the Pussycat Dolls:

I really hope she shows up on Girlicious --which I hope you're watching, as it is CRACKTASTICALLY entertaining, in a completely shameful way --to explain to the cast why over-the-knee boots paired with a strapless spring dress ganked from the costume closet of your local junior high school's production of Bye Bye Birdie REALLY enhances your confidence, your sexiness, or your sexy confidenceness. I just want to hear how she would explain it.

Here's the thing: This dress is a gorgeous color and it's better and classier than about 98 percent of what Nicole puts on her body when she's in Pussycat Doll mode. In that sense, props to her for finding her inner tastefulness amid all that confident sexy confident-sexyness.

I just wish she'd worn lip gloss. The first time I looked at this picture, I actually thought her mouth had been blurred out -- and while I sometimes wish that would happen to her while she's performing, it was still freaky. Just a LITTLE tint would've helped. Maybe on the new season of The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search For The Next Pussycat Doll: Finding Somebody Other Than Asia: Dude, She Totally Dropped Off The Face Of The Earth After Winning The First Season: And Robin Antin Needs To Pay Her Mortgage, they can do a segment on teaching the girls that a nude/downplayed lip does not mean an ABSENT lip. And also that they should ignore a lot of the OTHER things the Pussycat Dolls do to themselves. But mostly the lip thing.

So, there's this brilliantly terrible show on TLC called I've Got Nothing To Wear, in which a "celebrity" "stylist" I've never heard of goes through a person's closet, pulls out all their awful clothes, and takes it back to a tiny room where three "design prodigies" are waiting to turn all the junk into six brand-new outfits (two each, one for day and one for evening) -- all under the guise of a "master" designer whose claim to fame is working at the Fashion Institute of Technology by day, hawking wares on QVC by night, having nothing interesting to say, and sporting the most frightening plastic surgery on a man since Kenny Rogers. (Sorry about all the quotation marks, but seriously, the show's budget is like $5, so I'm dubious about all these claims -- especially when one of the "design prodigies" used his three days to glue scraps of fabric to a mannequin and then go home early to watch cartoons. I'm not kidding. He could not wait to get out of there. Although he may also have been from space. It's unclear.)

It's actually kind of a good concept for a show, except for the aforementioned fact that it's executed on the cheap and without anyone worth caring about on it (now, if Tim Gunn were there, it would be a different story, but he is too magnificent for a $5 show). But seriously, half the time, the new outfits are just as hideous as the old ones, like, say, the thick wool romper made from an old cream overcoat and, I think, bits of a pair of jeans. And it's amusing watching the person who owns the clothes try to choke back on her rising bile when she sees what's happened to them.

All of which, of course, brings me around to the Pussycat Dolls.

Because the more I see them, the more I feel like all their costumes were spit out by the I've Got Nothing To Wear chop shop by some blind, drunk, and blind-drunk prodigies with a glue-gun fetish. Note the conspicuous absence of Asia, the horrible winner of The Pussycat Dolls Present: Yada Yada Yada, New Band Member. Either she didn't work out so well, or she's terrified of wearing anything that's held together by staples and scotch tape. Man, she dodged a bullet.

In life, there are few things to me as freaky as finding that the Pussycat Dolls don't look that bad. They are the queens of needing to remove about five or six elements from their outfits in order to reach the right balance. They also often dress like an alien army from the planet Rack.

But, dammit, I'm developing a soft spot for the Dolls, due entirely to my fascination with the screaming, dancing, finger-pointing, bad singing, and arguments over who gets to perform on the giant swing -- not to mention insistences that songs like "Don't 'Cha and "Bleep" are odes to empowerment -- that happen on the televisual crack The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search To Add Another Body To Its Already Enormous Group Of Bland, Interchangeable People. That doesn't mean their music doesn't make the baby Jesus cry, but it does mean that -- so help me -- I don't think they look that bad here.

These are girls who could stand to go a little simpler now and then, or else we're so blinded by the insanity that we never bother to remember their faces. Don't get me wrong -- they're the Pussycat Dolls, and I know this means they're always going to be a little bit Vegas, a lot of metallic sheen, and a dash of Not From This Galaxy. I understand that they have a sartorial mandate. But it's working for them better than usual in this pic. Of course, Pouty Person On Left might find that tiny skirt a little difficult to maneuver if she wants to, say, scratch her ankle, or indeed lean very gently in any direction. Faux Carrie Underwood looks pretty cute, though. Nicole's dress is hot. The redhead's LBD has a kinky fur trim at the bottom that gives it a nifty edge. The fabric of the gold thing on the far right looks kind of cheap and uncomfortable, which probably means it would cost $20,000 at Barney's, but Nameless Girl (seriously, the show tries to convince us they have personalities, but even the contestants clearly forget the names of anyone who isn't Nicole about two seconds after they've heard them) is working it okay.

I am a trifle concerned about That Other Doll. You know the one. Whoever did her makeup clearly has a fetish for people who eat the entirety of a Mini Babybel cheese, then use the halves of the red casing to make hilarious wax lips. Not that I've done that. Well, not today. But outside the confines of a Safe Place, like one's living room, it's not very fair to her to do that to her face. The whole effect reminds me of a scene from Spaceballs where our heroes get captured after a spectacular dive through closing doors, but then it's revealed that they're actually still safe because it was their stunt doubles who were captured, and they're all complete schmoes -- like the person in the wedding dress, who is not in fact Daphne Zuniga, but rather a squat man with a mustache and stringy hair. That's kind of how I feel here -- like Sixth Doll is somebody's bad stunt double (because the real Doll is fleeing Robin Antin's evil empire as fast as her stilettos can carry her), and they just hoped we wouldn't notice the bad fake, since we don't recognize half these people on a regular basis anyway.

But all in all, when you consider what these people wear most of the rest of the time, at least 70 percent of this photo is a step in a good direction. I'm not sure where the seventh Doll is going to go, though -- we don't really have room for one. Maybe she can stand in the back and jump up when the flash goes off? Or maybe they'll greenlight a second season of the show documenting the process of the new Doll mud-wrestling the old ones one by one -- while singing, of course -- to determine whose spot she takes.

So I've been looking for a cute black minidress for about six years. Okay, six months, but it FEELS like a long time. The perfect one is hard to find. So I'd like to congratulate Pussycat Dolls guru Robin Antin on finding one that works nicely on her. It's short, but she's got great legs and the long sleeves ensure that the skank-factor is low. The boatneck is flattering, the sparkles distract from how much she needs to not wear nude lipstick and her shoes are good.  Sure, her earrings kind of look like two dangling IUDs, but overall the effect is, as I've learned from watching The Pussycat Dolls Present The Pussycat Dolls Search for the New Pussycat Doll, sassy BUT classy.

Okay: you found me out. She looks fine, all right? But that show is seriously totally freaking genius. It's like the funniest thing on television right now and I had to find some excuse to talk about it. Is it empowering women, as McG claims? Well, I seriously doubt that Gloria Steinem is watching it with a bowl of popcorn on her lap, going, "AT LAST. ALL I HAVE WORKED FOR: ACHIEVED!" However, it is possible that Gloria Steinem is watching it with a bowl of popcorn on her lap, on the phone with her friend, saying, "I think I might need to set a season pass for this thing. Don't tell anyone." It is that captivatingly cheesy. With the dancing and the short shorts and Lil' Kim and a hilarious choreographer who scolds girls for eschewing their boob pads, it's kind of like Fame, but with more boas. Every week, it imparts lessons like, "be confident" (AKA: show more cleavage), "be creative" (AKA: surprise us with your cleavage) and "be sexy" (AKA: CLEAVAGE).  And then there is dancing. I love it. And I had to tell the world, okay? Is that so wrong? It's Courtney Peldon's birthday, and if I can't sing the praises of a show that regularly features sequined bra tops, then what CAN I do?

Okay, I can't find a good black mini-dress. Point taken.

We're not completely sure what about being a Pussycat Doll evokes costuming oneself like a futuristic porn gladiatrix, but here's lead singer Nicole, dressed like she's playing the leading role in the rebels vs. establishment erotic drama Colisemen:

This one is almost a scrolldown. The harsh hair and makeup, which age her (she's allegedly 28; would you have guessed closer to 35? I would've), are odd enough; then you get down to the stretchy jumpsuit and the cuffs, as if she's hoping people will mistake her for somebody with either rock talent, super powers, or both, and then you arrive at the lace-up leather legwarmers/boot covers that have been yanked back to reveal mesh peep-toed foot sheaths. I refuse to call them shoes; it would defame the entire concept of the mighty shoe.

And how sweet that she appears to be blowing a raspberry right back at us, unless of course that's collagen gone wrong. Did Jessica Simpson's inflate her lips to sausage proportions in vain?

The rest of the Pussycat Dolls should consider themselves lucky that we can't remember their faces or names...

While I'm stunned that the Pussycat Dolls managed to win an MTV VM-Eh award, I'm always happy to see this anonymous gaggle of "singers" prowling the red carpet.

Lead Cat -- we know she's the lead because she is allowed to stand slightly ahead of the rest -- actually looks okay, as does the blue sparkly one next to her, who resembles an Apollo 13 wife on her way to a launch party but is at least managing to make retro-chic work for her a bit. Well, except for the bun, which I suspect cost $13, and may actually be a pastry with cheap hair extensions wrapped around it.

Duff Cat on the left up there continues her remarkable embrace of all things Hilary Before Her Good Makeover -- down to the little extra-cinched hem on her dress, which echoes something Hil has already worn. But she should fire whomever chose a dress for her that has built-in wrinkles; ditto Bland Cat, second from the right, who looks like she shook it out from a crumpled heap in her neglected dry-cleaning pile and figured that no one would notice because one of the other cats was bound to look worse. (She was half correct.) And Posh Cat on the far right, whom I once thought bore a passing facial resemblance to everybody's favorite footballer's wife, was obviously erroneously inspired by Lindsay Lohan's Shakespearian bloomers. She barely coughed up a hairball's worth of original fug.

Aged Cat, meanwhile, looks like the cocktail waitress at the Playboy Mansion's Senior Bunny Texas Hold 'Em tournament. I mean, she's sporting a VISOR with her dress. A VISOR, PEOPLE. You know who else wears visors? Kevin Federline. And come to think of it, there's a slight facial resemblance to him in this photo. So until she earns her way back out of this reeking bog, she's known to me only as Federfeline. And being a groin-licking mewling version of Mr. Spears is a sad, sad fate indeed.

I'm a bit upset with whoever foisted the Pussycat Dolls upon us. As a burlesque act, I'm fine with them, but I didn't need a creepy made-to-order pop group version. I've already had a place in my heart for a pre-fab girl band, and it was the Spice Girls, and the boring, pointless Dolls songs and their unmemorable members can't quite compete with Sporty, Scary, Ginger, Baby, Posh, and "zig-a-zig-ahhhhhhh" in my book.

I mean, look at them. Not only are they trying really hard to be edgy and exotic, but half of them are just deeply discounted version of other people:

Girl On The Left looks like a distant cousin of Hilary Duff as reimagined by Anne Rice. Second from the left, we have a facial knockoff of Posh Spice (but dressed like Sienna Miller) from the years when she actually ate food that required chewing. Third from the left, we have a copycat Carrie Underwood in an S&M figure-skating costume. And second from the right, it's Christina Milian by way of Jennifer Beals circa Flashdance, when she wore that "shirt" that consisted merely of a backless, sleeveless tuxedo-style bib and random disconnected cuffs floating around her wrists.

The other two just look like drag queens. Old drag queens. I can't help it; that's just what they say to me. I look at the photo and think, "Wow, that must have been some rough road." They just don't work for me as completely as Spice did. Their music is selling like hotcakes (I imagine a lot of cheerleading squads are choreographing to "Don't 'Cha") and while it makes my ears bleed, I accept that's not the case for other people; however, I wonder how long they can last if nobody starts aspiring to their image. I can't see girls buying a doily bustier just because Anonymous Lead Singer Lady is wearing one, nor cutting off their collars and throwing the rest of the shirt away as an homage to Ms. Strangely Beals up there. But a lot of people tried to copy Sporty's garb, Posh's prim couture, and Ginger's sassy punk style. We also bought into their personalities. The Spice Girls made it work, made it original, made it marketable; the Pussycat Dolls are just sort of... there. It's all so average. Half-hearted. Who are those people up there, and why do I care if she's got real big brains but he's looking at her [BLEEEEP]?

Maybe they just need identities. Idiotic cat-themed identities that simple minds like me can use to identify one from the other in some kind of meaningful way. Like... oh, I don't know, Alley Cat, or, in the case of one or two, Tom Cat, if you get my drift (no relation to the Scientological marvel). I'm not sure if it would help, but maybe I could start to care, or even digest them better, if they broke themselves down into easily digestible pieces -- you know, succumb to the brilliance of a well-oiled, manipulative marketing machine instead of just trotting around as an indistinguishable, sort of shoddy, and oddly-dressed whole. (I mean... "Burlesque-themed" is one thing, but seriously, For Whom The Beals Tolls up there looks like she completed her outfit with construction paper.)

I am thrilled, though, that somebody finally cracked the quandary of how to keep one's feet cool while they're packed into black boots. Clearly, we just needed to cut out the toes. Peekaboo boots! It's so simple! Thank you, Undead Cat.