Makeover Montage: A Fashion in Film Podcast · Marie Lodi and Blaire Bercy

Runway Hexes and Witchy Statement Coats in Beastly (2011)

·1 hr 12 min·4 clips

They describe Kendra’s black cropped wig, smoky eye, and asymmetrical leather jacket as “fashion goth.”

It starts in October. Marie Lodi and Blair open as if they are already halfway through a haunted closet raid, then use the film to talk about teen-movie polish, fashion, and the kind of screen persona that gets built by a costume and a mood. Vanessa Hudgens comes up quickly. The hosts latch onto her as someone who could have stayed inside High School Musical forever, but instead kept reinventing herself through goth edges, piercings, and a willingness to do looser, stranger work than the machine would have liked. Miley Cyrus enters the chat too. That detour turns into a comparison point for how former child and teen stars refuse the sanitized route, with Marie and Blair treating rebellion as a styling choice, a career choice, and a public identity choice all at once. Alex Pettyfer gets dragged. He is framed as the popular guy in school, an asshole who cares about his looks, which makes him a fit for a movie that wants its handsome boy to feel like a problem before the plot says so. Peter Krause shows up as Kyle's father. His presence folds into the episode's read on wealth, absence, and why the film keeps circling a rich, emotionally unavailable family setup. They keep returning to costume. The pair talk the way fashion-film obsessives talk, using clothes to track class, vanity, control, and the tiny decisions that tell you whether a character is trying to seduce, dominate, hide, or survive. The conversation keeps moving. It slides from the film into other pop-culture memories, into jokes about how much a former Disney star can subvert expectations, and into the pleasure of watching someone like Vanessa Hudgens choose a lane that feels more self-authored than market-tested. The hosts love a good bad boy. They are interested in the specific flavor of asshole charisma that makes a movie's romantic center feel rotten even before anyone names the problem, and they keep circling that rot as both narrative and wardrobe issue. The banter is the point. It can branch and backtrack and correct itself mid-thought, but the mess is part of the charm because the discussion is clearly being discovered out loud rather than recited from notes. The episode ends the way it began. By the time they close, the listener has a clear sense that the movie matters less as a prestige object than as a very specific excuse for two people to chase a costume, a celebrity persona, and a joke until all three finally click together.

As heard by us

A loose, costume-centered movie chat that treats style as identity and status.

The episode uses a teen-film makeover story to think aloud about clothes, status, and identity. Marie Lodi and Blair move from Vanessa Hudgens' post-High School Musical reinvention to Alex Petterfer's vain, self-absorbed character and the movie's rich-kid styling, treating…

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Why you'd press play

A spooky October chat that makes Vanessa Hudgens the main event.

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