'Pretty In Pink' Taught Me It Was OK To Be Quirky

Andy Walsh was the first time I saw myself in a character.

At 9 years old, I pulled my mom’s polka-dotted turtleneck sweater up over my legs, and tied the arms tight around my tiny waist like a belt. Growing up, I often turned my mother’s clothing into weird fashion devices. I was also a natural redhead, always the only one in my class and had few ginger-haired role models. The ones I did have, like Pippi Longstocking and Anne of Green Gables, were characters who had a defining trait I recognized: eccentricity.

They had agency over their individuality. But I struggled to make mine feel like a strength rather than a shortcoming. As a child, I begged my mom to let me dye my hair blonde.

“Don’t you know women pay to get your hair color?” she huffed. My bright hair made me stand out. What I wanted then was to blend in with everyone else.

That is, until I saw “Pretty in Pink” and began to understand the things that made me different held more power than I realized. As Andy Walsh, Molly Ringwald embodied a girl I recognized. I was several years younger, but identified with the wavy, red-haired misfit, with freckles like mine and an unapologetic style. Eleven years before Cher chose her outfit from a computer program and plucked it from a rotating closet in “Clueless,” Andy practiced a similar, more relatable ritual. She emerges on screen wearing a dark vest over a white lace blouse, belted pencil skirt, cameo necklace and socks over tights.

“$15 for the shoes, secondhand, I made the rest,” she replies when her dad marvels at her “latest creation” and wonders about the cost. At school, her outcast best friend Duckie (uniquely stylish himself with a bolero tie and blazer) lovingly calls her outfit a “volcanic ensemble.” But the same wardrobe is later ridiculed in class by the rich, blonde popular girl.