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    Votes on Camp?

    Posted Wednesday, April 08, 2009 6:19 PM | By Noreen Malone
    I hate to interrupt such a thoughtful discussion with yet another micro-dissection of what was in Michelle Obama's Grand Tour steamer trunk but I couldn't resist this item from the Times of London pointing out her false eyelashes. And not just any false eyelashes, but "full-on, all-out diva lashes, the kind you normally find on D-list celebrities or in drag-act dressing rooms."  The Times says it was part of her plan to seduce Europe (easier to bat your eyelashes at a whole continent when they're industrially made!) but I wonder whether the thing Mrs. Obama is flirting with is the line between icon and camp. Of late, she's seen herself represented in wax at Madame Tussaud's and Barbie-fied on the cover of New York. Someone is ghostwriting a Tumblr as her arms. I might amp up my makeup routine, too. But is she purposely feeding our frenzy by becoming an ever-more bombastic version of herself, intoxicated just as much as we are by the whirlwind pace of her style canonization? Or are the eyelashes just a tacit, down-to-earth admission that, hey, we all need a little help in front of the camera? (A sharp contrast, I might add, to Carla Bruni, who's undermined every woman in the world other than Carla Bruni by saying makeup makes us all look bad after age 25).
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