Who Made Cheryl Tiegs Wear That Awful Dress?

There she was, the iconic Cheryl Tiegs, larger than life on my bigscreen TV last night on the "Celebrity Apprentice."  And she was wearing a tight, unflattering sleeveless cocktail dress.

Egads.

My husband quipped "You'd think a model would know how to dress."

I grew up emulating Cheryl Tiegs. She was the "It" girl for everything from natural beauty to makeup to hair.

So why did she look so bad on Celebrity Apprentice?

I supposed that someone – maybe a show producer – convinced her to wear the requisite cocktail dress into the board room. (I complained that last year it seemed weird that a woman would ever wear a cocktail dress into a boardroom.)

But Victoria Gotti got to wear a long-sleeve jacket and pantsuit. So why did Cheryl Tiegs have to bear her not-ready-for-primetime arms in a putty-colored cocktail dress?

It all seemed slightly humiliating. She's such an accomplished, beautiful woman and someone gave her the bad advice (at least that's how I imagine it in my mind) to wear that awful dress.

Sure, she was the first one to get booted off, etc. etc. But it's that lousy fashion choice of hers (not to mention that her lipstick seems stuck in a timewarp) that has me the most concerned.

Maybe what I don't really want to admit is that the most jarring thing about the whole incident is that Cheryl Tiegs looks like a normal person does at 60, which means our skin isn't taut, our hair isn't shiny and our arms definitely aren't ready to be bared in a sleeveless dress.

The difference is that most of us know better than to wear a sleeveless cocktail dress in public at that age if we don't still have the body to carry it off. It might be time for older celebs to take a style cue from us regular gals for once and simply try to remember that we don't still look like we did at 25.