I mean, even in earlier seasons, Candice and Nina got some nice styles, it was just that they were ordinary clothes because they were ordinary teens and I respected that, I essentially had Elena’s seasons 1-3 and Caroline’s season 2 wardrobe when I was 16.
and then you had Bonnie
Like they purposefully covered her up and made her frumpy.
What I found was that they had her in clothes that looked like hand-me-downs from Caroline and Elena which is why it was always ill-fitted and that the clothes they had her matched a mommy blog from 2009, the year TVD aired.
For reasons not related to this dress I did not win. What I wanted to point out is this.
This is the dress Bonnie wore to Caroline’s wedding and if you noticed it’s nearly the exact same as my dress from 2011.
While I didn’t hate this dress I never really liked it. It was mostly functional. It was the only dress I could find that fit my boobs (they’re quite large) and didn’t drag on the floor (a rule from the pageant).
When I saw this dress on Bonnie I didn’t feel any different. While she is significantly more beautiful than me not even she could make this dress look anything other than functional. It’s a pretty dress but not one that wows anyone. It reminds me of her prom dress.
It’s pretty on her and functional as a prom dress but it’s very muted especially compared the other prom dresses in that episode.
It not news that they put Bonnie in muted clothes but this is season 8, her wardrobe had actually improved by this point. However something I noticed while making my survey is that her wardrobe actually got worse in season 8 and the fact that I actually own one of the dresses they put her in is proof of that.
I’ve mentioned many, many times before how this frustrates me I just thought I would add to that long list because every corner I turn I find something new in terms of how they screwed over Bonnie.
It’s a known fact that her hair is awful in the early seasons but her hair while in her cheerleading uniform, the only clothes they couldn’t purposefully make bad, makes me so angry because I know this is deliberate.
How do I know? As a former cheerleaders one of the first things you learn is that on game day and practice your hair is supposed to be up. It can be on pigtails, or a bun, or any updo, it just needs to be up and out of your face, something Bonnie’s hair isn’t in either of those pictures.
And again I’d give them the benefit of the doubt as many t.v. shows and movies forget this fact often (and drive me insane doing it). Hayden Panetiere being the biggest offender in both Heroes and Bring it On, but this is a convenient fact that they remembered for both Caroline and Elena.
Their hair is both up and out of their face so that they can do stunts without getting their hair caught in things. Hell there’s kinda even a storyline around their hair being up in season 4 when Elena steals the girls ribbon (which made no sense considering the ribbon wasn’t her team’s color). Every single girl at that cheer competition’s hair is up, but not Bonnie’s. Her hair is down with a bad weave. They couldn’t make the cheerleading uniform look bad on her so they had to go for her hair.
@scorpio-karma since we were talking about Bon’s fashion today…
Doesn’t it just kill that so many of Bonnie’s clothes come from Free People, which is a pricy as hell brand that does have cute clothes…and yet they still managed to dress Bonnie in such a frumpy way? Idk if it was sizing or intense layering of the clothes or what bc boho pieces like what FP sells are supposed to be kind of free-fitting and layered, but with Bonnie it’s just off. I can’t put a finger on why, except for my base reaction of “it’s ugly, they downplayed her” which is true, but I can’t like…figure out the exact formula of what they did wrong (and this is just with her clothes, not those horrible wigs or her make-up, that’s another rant), so I was wondering what you thought, since you ran the Bonnie survey and do wardrobe boards and metas?
I’m finally not at work or or about to fall asleep so I can finally answer this.
First thing I’d like to say is I’m not really much of a fashion connoisseur, as in I don’t know much beyond what does and does not look good. I can’t tell you brands, where it’s from, or what is and isn’t expensive. All I can really tell you is how it’s worn and after years of wearing clothes that are by no means expensive, I’ve learned that really cheap clothes can look good and even expensive if worn right and as Bonnie’s wardrobe on TVD proved the opposite is true, so I am by no means surprised that these pricey clothes they put her in don’t look their worth.
Expensive clothes can look cheap if they’re not worn right and on her they never really are because as I said in my other post it often looks like she’s wearing Caroline and Elena’s hand-me-downs and I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t the case a few times. Anything that they decided Nina or Candice couldn’t wear they just give it to Bonnie.
I mean look here
Bonnie and Elena are essentially wearing the same style of shirt, but a you pointed out it’s more ill fitting on Bonnie. It might be because they chose to pair that with a zip up hoodie, but I can tell by the bunched up fabric at the bottom that it’s a little too big.
Am I in conspiracy theory territory? Yes, but this show has spawned so much mistrust over the years that my conspiracy theory holds more probability of being true than anything out of the writers’ mouths.
Look at what she wears in the pilot episode.
There’s nothing notable about it which you’d think there would because it was not only the pilot episode but THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. I don’t what you did but the first day of school was always the most exciting because I got to wear my favorite outfit out of the new clothes I bought. It was the day to be fashionable before going back to sweat pants because school started too damn early in the morning. She’s wearing a plain shirt with a purple jacket which I can tell was their way of making her “mystical” because it’s purple, but other than that there’s nothing notable if that even counts. The most in character part of that outfit is her necklace which is hidden by the scarf.
And that necklace isn’t even all that unique because if you look in the first picture Elena’s necklace is very similar and I’m not even sure that;s the one Stefan gave her (I never really paid attention to them so I’m really not sure). Her clothes tell me nothing about her, and you’ve already heard this rant, but the fact that her clothes tell me nothing about her character is the biggest injustice of her terrible wardrobe because there’s not even a reasonable excuse for it.
I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt due to fashion trends back then, but the terrible fashion from back then doesn’t even explain it. This is what BoHo inspired looked like in 2009.
This is what they put Bonnie in.
In fact I found that if there was anything from back then that they dressed her more like it was this picture I found for fashion for Moms-on-the-go.
I’m pretty sure they actually had her wear they outfit in the top right and that’s her jacket from the pilot on the top left. Which I think partially explains her ill fitted clothes if this and thing like this were their inspiration for how they dressed Bonnie. The way that fashion designers dress moms is very similar to how they dress plus sized people which is in over-sized clothes, layers of clothes, and “fun” patterns all to hide the fact you’re not a size two. This has gotten significantly better over the years but 2009 this was still very much the mindset.
So if they’re dressing someone who’s obviously not plus sized in plus sized inspired clothes it’s not going to look good because it doesn’t even look good for the people they make it for. There’s a reason most plus sized women don’t like plus sized clothes and it’s because they’re the clothes that are clearly made to exclude them from most fashion trends which the more I think about it the more this makes sense and the more I get pissed off because her wardrobe’s function was literally that–to exclude her from fashion trends that might make her outshine the protagonist in looks (which honestly exposes how flimsy their plot was because it hinged entirely upon Elena being the prettiest of them all). Her clothes were always meant to oppress her and that’s why they don’t look right.
I don’t know if any of that made sense or answered your question but that’s my take on it.
One of the things that drives me insane about Bonnie’s wardrobe in the early seasons is that it doesn’t tell me much about her. It never adds to her character like the others did.
Caroline was always in short dresses. Occasionally she wore jeans but it was always something that was clearly meant to be fashionable. Her clothes matched her personality which at the time meant to be bitch, but was insecure and someone who cared too much about her appearance and as such her wardrobe matched that.
Elena was always wearing “girl next door” clothes which is a weird classification that in of itself, but she wore jeans and converse and a solid color shirt. Very plain, it was almost modeled after Clark Kent where they always tried to keep him in primary colors. What that told me is that she was always meant to be the self-insert protagonist. There wasn’t much to her wardrobe because there was never meant to be much to her character beyond being “relatable” so that anyone could vicariously live through her. But either way it matched her.
However Bonnie, her wardrobe was always supposed to be eccentric. Her clothes were always supposed to be a little off, but a little off in a hippie sense, not wearing Caroline and Elena’s hand-me-downs way and it drives me insane that they rarely are off in that way. That’s what gets me about her wardrobe being bad, it’s not that she has the worst clothes and hair, it’s that no thought was given when they were coming up with it. They mostly just put her in the same clothes as everyone else.
In the books she wore interesting pieces and was very spiritual, in that she beleived in the witch stuff. There was very little skepticism and that was probably one of the first ways they cut down her character. You could tell they tried to add some BoHo looks but they never quite followed through. Most of the time seasons 1-4 she was either dressed in frumpy sweaters or exactly the same as Elena. She didn’t have much individuality in her wardrobe which makes when Caroline gives her Damon’s (Emily’s) necklace in season 1 because she knows it’s her style, make no sense because by that point Bonnie doesn’t have a style, or distinct look. She doesn’t wear anything that’s hers.
Unless it was a decade dance she was mostly in jeans and a solid color. Occasionally dress, but otherwise pretty basic, no real interesting prints like her character suggest she should. She doesn’t get any kind of distinct style until about season 5 which you can tell is when they started letting Kat have more influence over her wardrobe, noted by the haircut and the fact that she’s wearing clothes that were completely different from the previous ones. This change could be due to college, as they did up all of the girls’ wardrobe, but also note that they still had Bonnie mostly dressing like Elena as well, until she gets to 1994 at which point I think Kat had complete control over her wardrobe as she has a lot of nostalgia for the 90s and Plec didn’t have much investment in her character at the time. (It took that season for Plec to notice the potential of Bonnie and even then still squandered it).
We know that her character doesn’t get better clothes until after she gets “value” by Elena leaving and befriending Damon, but I’m willing to bet that it’s also because Plec didn’t care enough about how Bonnie dressed and just gave Kat free range as well which while was a benefit on the end, it says just how much thought was put into her character in general and the fact that the only person who had any investment in Bonnie was Kat.
POC of TVD 