A fresh new batch of starlets is refusing to play dress-up. Jonathan Van Meter confronts Hollywood’s anti-fashion brigade.

“Hollywood is all about making an entrance,” says Rose McGowan, who single-handedly redefined making an entrance when she wore just slightly more than a G-string to the MTV Video Music Awards last year. “I don’t want to be a walking advertisement for anyone other than myself.” McGowan is engaged to Marilyn Manson, and the couple have become, at least from a fashion perspective, a latter-day Sonny and Cher — shopping for each other, each pushing the other a little further into the outrageous. “I think Marilyn looks like Jerry Hall,” she says of her fiancé. “I’m engaged to Jerry Hall. It makes me laugh when a stylist tries to dress him: ‘Here, we have an idea for you.’ Uh … no. This is not a person you are going to assign a style to. He’s very obviously got his own.”

McGowan, who is 24, says she, like her fiancé, is “not the stylist’s favorite person.” The day before filming began on Scream, McGowan went on an emergency shopping expedition at the Santa Rosa Mall for her costumes. At a recent photo shoot for Jane magazine, she rejected all the things the stylist brought and went down the street to a vintage shop to buy her own dress. She admires only one designer, John Galliano, because “he’s as schizophrenic, stylistically, as I am.”