One woman decided to create a fan fiction project centered around Ann M. Martin's Babysitters Club series and take it as far as it could possibly go — not just imagining the adult lives of the BSC crew, but actually cultivating a fashion style around each and every one of them. And it you haven't guessed it already, the name of the project is pretty perfect. Welcome, dear readers, to The Babysitters Fashion Club.
Created by Ruth Barabe, the idea came to her when she was working at a museum, where the business-casual dress code left her feeling a bit uninspired.
"I was a little bored with my regular rotation of outfits," Barabe said in an interview with the Billfold, "so a co-worker and I decided to do a week of Baby-Sitters Club-inspired outfits, just to liven things up a bit."
A few years after the fun experiment, Barabe once again began to suffer from fashion ennui, and decided to try the whole thing a second time around. In her words, she "kind of just ran with it" — and The Babysitters Fashion Club was born.
To give you an idea of what the whole enterprise entails, here's an excerpt from the blog — a snippet about the artsy, former junior BSC member Mallory, including a photo of Barabe dressing up as her imagined adult version of the character:
"Mallory had a Francophile phase in college, specifically of the French New Wave variety. She dated a film student who smoked Djarum cigarettes and showed her Truffaut and Godard movies and ... things kind of got out of hand. She dressed in pencil skirts and Jean Seberg stripes, and got Anna Karina-style bangs, despite her hairdresser's woeful pleading that they wouldn't work with her curls. You could often find her at parties encamped on the sofa, chain smoking and saying eye-rollingly terrible things like 'modern music is so boring.'
Her film student boyfriend made a short movie for class of her waking up in her bed, brushing her teeth, and wandering around a playground on a windy day, looking despaired. The film was torn to shreds by his classmates in the critique, and he broke up with her. It took her a year to grow her bangs back out."
While Mallory had more of a literary bent in the series — writing short stories and reading literature on the regular — it definitely isn't a huge leap of the imagination to think that she'd get into movies by Truffaut or Godard — and that, as a character who wasn't always super-fond of her hair, she'd want "Anna Karina-style bangs."
You can see more of Barabe's fan fiction stylings over at her website here.
