Utah is trending right now, at least in the reality TV universe. Between The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, it’s clear that viewers across the country are fascinated by that icy tundra over there, where they drink more soda than water. My theory is that there’s a certain Anywhere’s Ville, USA quality to the suburban environments the stars of these shows live in and the lifestyles they enjoy there. In the Housewives space, other cities are very clearly of themselves: Miami is Spanish insults and resort wear; New York City is galas and clean tailoring; Beverly Hills is conspicuous consumption and mansions made of glass.
Salt Lake City, though, is harder to pin down. It’s almost as if none of the people there are from there—none of them truly belong there or seem like they fit—but where it is they are from is also nebulous. Meredith Marks, for example, is a Jewish woman originally from New York whose husband commutes to Ohio for work. Why do they live in Utah, how did they get there, and why don’t they leave? Someone like Heather Gay, alternatively, is descended from the pioneers who settled in Utah in the 19th century and grew up in the Mormon church, and yet she lives in a house that looks like you could pick it up and put it back down in New Jersey, where Teresa Giudice could live in it comfortably. There’s no clear culture to point to other than Mormonism—which most of the cast are not a part of or are barely—to explain the bland, 50 shades of grey and beige thing these gals have going on.
Enter Bronwyn Newport, a 39-year-old fashion blogger with a chic bob. Y’all know how I feel about women with bobs on reality television—they carry their shows without exception—but RHOSLC’s reigning bob queen, Whitney Rose, has been getting on my nerves with her “healing journey,” so we’ve been due for a newbie. And she’s a brunette!
Bronwyn made waves not with her bob, not with her May-December marriage, but with her sense of style. She’s a big fan of campy, colorful couture (just don’t call it costume).
“I just think that—almost to a fault—my goal is to look different,” she told The New York Times. “When people don’t get it or don’t like it or look at it weird or misunderstand where I’m coming from, from a style perspective, it almost spurs me on in a really immature way.”
The NYT calls her style “maximalist,” she calls it “pageantry and ridiculousness,” but I call it “Paige DeSorbo.”
Paige is the brunette bob of Summer House (though her hair is longer now, alas, but she still has bob energy), and while her style is decidedly more New York in that she loves black and white and tailoring, she is the campy couture queen of the non-Housewives side of Bravo.
But it’s not the fashion that makes these women part of an important reality TV tradition; it’s their doesn’t-suffer-fools attitudes. In a world full of dime-a-dozen bottle blondes with the same botox-ed and filler-ed faces wielding Instagram screenshots and iMessage receipts, you need a natural brunette who always tells the truth. Bronwyn and Paige both walked into shows that already had distinct voices before they got there, but they didn’t cower at the pressure to make their marks. If anything, they knocked down the door with their designer heels, picked it up and put it back on its hinges, looked in the eye of the first person to come around the corner investigating the noise, and said, “Where’s the party?” It’s that energy, and that energy only, that I watch reality TV for.