The New York Times: Pamela Anderson STILL isn’t wearing makeup

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 late last week. “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, released Monday, shows Anderson grinning and tossing her sun-bleached waves in items including bespangled miniskirts, boot-cut jeans, baby tees and denim jackets. She described the pieces, priced from $175 to $595, 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 C.J. 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 Mötley Crüe 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 capitalize 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.

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, in a metaphoric sense, “one way of peeling off the layers of my life,” she said. “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 to pretend to be something that I’m not.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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