Michelle Tanner’s High-Fashion Fashions

Remember Michelle Tanner’s outfits? They were the coolest – the oversized buttons, the sassy sweatsuits, the sunflower hats. Well, you can’t buy style that fly at The Children’s Place. Nope – those fashions went straight from the runway, to a seamstress who cuts down clothing for children and tiny adults, to your television. I didn’t believe it, either, but this week Ashley Olsen said:

We’d be in six-hour fittings three times a week, because we had to wear 12 different outfits. The majority of the wardrobe was made up of adult pieces, including Chanel and Marc Jacobs, cut to fit.

Now, I’d never call Ashley Olsen a liar (Mary-Kate, on the other hand…). It’s just that, even in the crazy 80s, I thought that Chanel and Marc Jacobs were a little more dignified than this:

Thanks to Olivia Newton John, aerobic wear was all the rage, and Givenchy went off the rails for a while there.

From Armani’s Fall/Winter 1990 “Cartoon Pandas And Whales” line.

The 90s were in full swing, and the House of Versace was all about these fetus-sized voodoo dolls with yarn hair.

Every student of fashion knows the 1992 collaboration between Jean-Paul Gaultier and Lisa Frank.

(L) Olsen in Oleg Cassini (Resort Collection); (R) Baby Jess Merriweather in Gymboree.

The running motif in Jil Sander’s poorly-received Spring 1991 line? Big-assed buttons.

Princess Diana wore nautical pieces on a Greek vacation, and the next season, Commes des Garcons was – in designer Kawakubo’s own words – “trying a thing.”

I thought that this was both twins, circa 1995, in Vera Wang. However, I’m told that this is a full-grown Mary-Kate Olsen, appearing alongside her paramour and an actual child. Honest mistake.