"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Monday, July 1, 2019

Favorite “Characters”: Tan France (Queer Eye)


Yep, another Queer Eye post.  Tan was actually my first exposure to the Queer Eye reboot, as I saw a couple short online videos of him helping celebrities with their wardrobes (Hasan Minhaj – love that one! – and Pete Davidson.)  It was a good incentivizer to check out Queer Eye, because even though I first watched these videos for the other person in them, I immediately knew that I liked this guy.

If those promo videos weren’t enough to make me a Tan fan, he would’ve won me over in the first episode when he begrudging told the hero he could keep his ugly flannel pajamas only if he promised Tan that “no woman will ever see them.”  The clothing expert regularly has quite the time going through a hero’s closet, agog at various fashion disasters found therein and ably demonstrating when a T-shirt is torn past the point of wearability.  He has an eye for noting when heroes veer outside of age-appropriate style (both ways – he’s just as likely to say, “You’re almost 40, you shouldn’t be dressing like a college student,” as, “You’re only 35, but this looks like something my dad would wear!”), and he’s fond of asking straight male heroes how their wives/girlfriends make an effort to look good for them, then flips it around to ask what kind of effort they make.

Once he’s gotten rid of all the clothes he can’t bear, it’s shopping time, and I really love watching Tan in these scenes.  He’s very attuned to people’s insecurities about their bodies, and he’s a big advocate for helping people realize they don’t need to be a certain size in order to look/feel sexy.  His major thing – even more than printed shirts and French tucks! – is focusing on the fit of clothes and finding choices/sizes that are appropriate for the hero’s body shape.  During the initial walk-through of the hero’s home, a frequent exclamation of his is, “This looks massive on you!”, and when he gets the hero into a fitting room, Tan immediately starts to show them how wearing clothes that fit better will seem to take a good 20 pounds off them.  He has a repertoire of other satirical tricks as well, from using a busy print to take attention away from the size of someone’s belly to using a slim pant leg to make someone look taller and leaner.

Like all of the Fab Five, Tan has a talent for building people up.  As much as he gently ribs the heroes for the wardrobe they start out with, he’s filled with compliments when he takes them to try on clothes he picks out.  He not only tells them they look good, he checks in with them to make sure that that’s registering.  “Do you see how good you look?” He asks.  “Do you feel sexy?  Do you feel confident?”  I especially enjoy it when the show makes over women and he always prefaces his compliments about their figures with reminders that he’s gay and isn’t saying it in “that way.”

One more thing I like about Tan is how he tailors (clothing pun!) the shopping experiences to fit the hero’s needs.  He’s taken more than one to a a Big and Tall store, where they realize how much less demoralizing it is to shop in a place where they can find more than two things that fit them.  And when a father of six said that he got all his clothes secondhand (explaining that, if he’s going to buy new clothes, it’s going to be for the kids or his wife,) Tan brought him to Target to show him that he can still find good-looking things within his budget.  It fits into his whole emphasis on making over the hero in a way they like/that suits them rather than just making them all over the way he would want.

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