Where once the name Pamela Anderson may have brought to mind a tousled blonde in a red swimsuit, running across a beach in slow motion, today the image is more likely to be of a bare-faced, softly spoken woman in billowing linen and runway-level restraint.
We’ve been witness to a kind of cultural alchemy. Because against all odds Pamela Anderson has done the unthinkable: she’s rewritten her own mythology. Unlike most icons – who are usually embalmed in the look that made them famous – Anderson has pressed delete on the Playboy playbook and emerged as something altogether more surprising. Not sexless, but soulful. Not diminished, but distilled.
It all started with Pamela, A Love Story, her 2023 Netflix documentary and reclamation project, a retelling of her life – in her own words and her own grainy VHS tapes. Suddenly, the Pamela we thought we knew was replaced by someone far more fascinating, more human. Someone… real. Her decision to attend events bare-faced (or, at least, in the most minimal of make-up) only fuelled our newfound obsession with Pamela 2.0.
When Grazia meets the 58-year-old in Copenhagen – where she’s attending a dinner thrown by Pandora, a brand she’s repped since 2023 – she looks exactly as you’d hope Pamela Anderson might look in 2025. That is to say, not a trace of the bombshell blueprint remains. The Bardot-ish black eyeliner? Gone. The towering peroxide mane? Not today. Instead, she arrives in a crisp white shirt, vintagey blue jeans, her still-blonde hair tied back into a low ponytail. Diamond studs glint from her ears, a single pendant swings from her neck.
She has just completed a whirlwind press tour for the remake of ’80s spoof classic The Naked Gun with co-star Liam Neeson, and a star turn in the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. ‘On paper, when I agreed to do the play and I knew that the press tour was happening at the same time, everyone thought I was crazy and that it was impossible. That’s why I said, “Yes, I’m gonna do it”,’ she pauses. ‘And it was really a huge undertaking, but I knew I could do it even though it was going to be difficult. And now I know I can do hard things, and that’s actually very exciting.’
For the past two years, Anderson’s diary has read less like a Hollywood veteran’s and more like a woman on her second (or third) debut. The OG icon, now dialled into something more of a Hitchcock blonde, has made headlines for all the right reasons: walking red carpets fresh-faced, sitting front row at Jacquemus, Chanel, The Row and Vivienne Westwood, and defying an industry where women are too often shelved at 40, let alone 58. And if she wasn’t being hailed for her refreshing rejection of glam-squad artifice, she was drumming up real Oscar buzz for The Last Showgirl - Gia Coppola’s bruising portrait of a fading Las Vegas performer, opposite Jamie Lee Curtis. The sort of role that made critics and fans alike sit up and ask: Where has this Pamela Anderson been hiding?
‘I still feel like I just started my career and all that came before was bootcamp,’ she says. ‘I was learning inside-out and backwards. I wasn’t really doing it like anybody else.’ Her transformation isn’t just internal, but wardrobe-deep. Her new look? Less look-at-me and more look-again. The bandage dresses of yesteryear have been replaced by pillbox hats, shirtdresses, pencil skirts. But she doesn’t overthink it. ‘People ask me about my style but I don’t know what I wore yesterday. It’s about what you’re wearing today.’ And she’s mostly styling herself. ‘I don’t listen to too many stylists,’ she says. But in a summer this busy, she’s enlisted a little help from fashion whisperer Bailey Moon. ‘I said I need some help and that we’re going to collab, I’m not just gonna wear what you tell me to wear. I told him to get all the fun stuff. I wanted everything to be very cinematic. I mean, it’s always going to be a little bit of a miss with me, but that’s part of my charm,’ she adds, her trademark self-deprecating wit firmly intact.
Spoiler: there have been no misses. Just a succession of scene-stealing looks that manage to be both referential and original. Vintage with a wink, glamorous but ‘still without make-up’, she says. ‘I want it to be joyful. I’ve been accessorising with all the Pandora jewellery, even in the movie. Growing up, my mom was bedazzled from head to toe and she gets sparklier the older she gets. But she didn’t have money, she had costume jewellery. And I feel it’s nice to [work with] a brand that’s accessible. Everyone wants to be Elizabeth Taylor, but I’m not, I’m a Pandora girl.’
Henrik Lischke is the senior fashion features editor at Grazia. Prior to that, he worked at British Vogue, and was junior fashion editor at The Sunday Times Style.