Recently I fired up the very silly martial arts action-comedy The Last Dragon (1985) in the background while I was doing some work. While it played, I was reminded of the first time I saw this cult classic, when a friend screened the movie on VHS at his birthday party sometime in either late 1985 or 1986. As a child I thought the movie was amazing. I loved the campy tone, and my eyes popped out of my head every time Vanity appeared onscreen. After my recent rewatch, I had much the same reaction: “Holy [BLEEP], Vanity is one of the most beautiful humans ever!’
Surely you remember model, actress, and singer Vanity. She’s hard to forget. Her real name was Denise Matthews, but in the eighties she was known professionally as Vanity. Prince, who ignited her career by making her the lead singer in a lingerie-clad girl group called Vanity 6, tried to convince her to take the stage name “Vagina,” which she thankfully rejected outright in favor of Vanity.
Her striking features are instantly recognizable: no one before or since has looked like Vanity. When I was a child she represented SEX (all caps!), thanks to her smoldering, jaw-dropping looks—the term “bedroom eyes” could’ve been coined just for her—and thanks to naughty Vanity 6 songs like “Nasty Girl.” Her performance in The Last Dragon is so sweet and adorable, too. She managed to be sensual and cute, all at the same time.
In the nineties Matthews ditched the stage name, left show biz, and became a born-again Christian, renouncing her former life. Years of drug abuse from her Hollywood days caused kidney problems, which led her death in 2016 at the age of 57. She was a magnetic performer, so it’s no surprise she went on to be a charismatic preacher as well. Knowing of Matthews’ conflicted relationship to her modeling, acting, and singing career, this post isn’t intended to reduce her worth to just a face, or just a body. She was obviously so much more than that, but she really was also one of the most astonishingly beautiful people the world has ever seen—and she had an inner beauty that shone through in films like The Last Dragon. In the parlance of that particular film, she had “The Glow.”
So many fans adore Denise Matthews and still mourn her death, seven years later. I have a friend who has spent much of that time posting photos of her online as a tribute. So consider this post an appreciation for what Vanity’s eighties work meant to so many. I think the sheer volume of images I’ve selected here reinforces what I wrote earlier: Denise Matthews was truly stunning. I simply couldn’t stop adding photos to the post! The nostalgic pull of childhood crushes never really ends, does it?
The Starfire Lounge 