Pamela Anderson has done some “life-ing” as she calls it. No longer strictly an object of adolescent fantasies, she has become a seasoned version of the girl next door – albeit with a lot more oomph.
“I’m enjoying the process of getting older,” Anderson, 56, said on a video call. “The things that are happening to my face – a little elasticity is leaving – I’m finding humour in that.”
She continued: “I feel sexier now that I have some secrets and some mystery. We don’t learn that until later in our lives.”
The call was about her new campaign for Re/Done, a denim brand that practices sustainability through processes like upcycling.
Its imagery shows Anderson grinning and tossing her sun-bleached waves in items including bespangled miniskirts, boot-cut jeans, baby tees and denim jackets.
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She described the pieces, priced from US$175 to US$595 (approximately RM832 to RM2,830), as “clothes that in the 90s I would have worn to the grocery store”.
The youthful attire in the “Re/Done & Pam” campaign, Anderson said, is “attached to a lot of great memories of my golden years”. But there is not much in the imagery to suggest CJ Parker, her pneumatically contoured character in Baywatch, gamboling in a red swimsuit on the beach.
For the campaign Anderson insisted the concept be on her terms – or “authentic,” as she said in her breezy, soft-spoken way, “and with a lot more meaning than a cash grab, or just putting a face to a brand”.
“I wanted it raw, no makeup,” she said, a look she embraced at Paris Fashion Week and in Hollywood, at events like this year’s Vanity Fair Oscars party.
Though the campaign may not have drawn from her Baywatch era, participating in it did transport Anderson back to that period of her life, when she was married to Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee and raising her sons Brandon, now 27, and Dylan, now 26.
“I think this collection represents a great capsule of my life at that time,” Anderson said. “I was working and I felt invincible.”
Back then plenty of people hoped to capitalise on her work and her stature as a pop idol, an impulse that spawned a steady profusion of wares including a Baywatch Barbie, a Pammy cola and prepaid phone cards.
But she has since focused on reclaiming her personal brand. In 2022, Anderson made her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart, the much put-upon chorus girl, in Chicago.
Last year she published Love, Pamela, a memoir interspersed with poetry – her own – and starred in a Netflix documentary, Pamela, A Love Story, which she co-produced with her elder son, who helped guide her when she was starting her vegan skin-care line, Sonsie Skin.
Read more: How Margot Robbie, Beyonce and Pamela Anderson made waves in fashion and beauty
More recently she wrapped The Last Showgirl, a film by director Gia Coppola starring Anderson as a dancer in her 50s seeking to reinvent herself and pondering where life will take her next.
She knows the movie has parallels to her own life. Going barefaced, as she does most days, is, according to her, in a metaphoric sense: “One way of peeling off the layers of my life.”
“I’m a fresh slate now, at the starting position of the next chapter.”
That chapter, she added: "Is going to be even better, now that I don’t have pretend to be something that I’m not.” – The New York Times
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