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Fashion guru Simon Doonan's 'beautiful' Irish life

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Simon Doonan

From the producer of the critically acclaimed comedy “Absolutely Fabulous” comes “Beautiful People,” a six-episode series by Barneys famous style guru Simon Doonan about how to become fabulous via ambition, youthful optimism and a loving, yet very dysfunctional family. 

Growing up the son of two Irish parents in Reading, England in an era when most of his male classmates were ogling stars like Bridgette Bardot and Jane Fonda, Doonan and his best friend Biddie Biddlecomb were busy trying to become them.

Not that they ever actually wanted to be women -- far from it. They just had too much fashion sense to be confined to one gender. It was something he had learned from his mother.

“My mother believed in the transformative power of platform shoes, and I do too,” Doonan, 56, told the Irish Voice during a recent interview. “She understood how you could transform yourself with a couple of shoulder pads, and that was her thing. She always felt that she was very average looking but she always made herself glamorous and interesting.”

In “Beautiful People,” the new TV series on Logo and LOGOonline.com, inspired by Doonan’s memoir “Nasty: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints,” Doonan takes us back to his unconventional childhood as the creative son of Irish parents growing up in England, and all the steps he took along the way that ultimately led to his job setting trends at the uber-glamourous Barneys New York fashion emporium.

Nowadays we’ve seen hundreds of TV series about young men with a special talent that lead them from very humble beginnings to a world beyond their wildest dreams, but to date not many of these stories have featured a lad who knows his way around a pair of Manolo Blahniks like Carrie Bradshaw. Until now, that is.

The show is set in 1997 to give it a more up to date feel than its original 1960s settings. In the first episode we meet the 13-year-old Simon, surrounded by dreams of hitting the big time and all the beautiful people that go with it. This is a young man who can’t open a fridge door without belting out a show tune, so clearly the path ahead will be a little unusual.

But even a budding peacock like Simon finds himself constantly upstaged by a family that’s even more eccentric than his latest attempts to be fabulous. Mom Debbie is a peroxide whirlwind of matriarchal warmth, husband Andy is a plumber who secretly listens to grand opera, and Simon’s older sister Ashlene is a wannabe hip hop queen who has shifted every boy in the neighborhood, and blind lodger Aunty Hayley has turned up and it looks like she will never leave.

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