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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