From the Archives: The Fast—and Fashionable—Florence Griffith Joyner

“Go with the Flo,” by Stephanie Mansfield, was originally published in the April 1989 issue of Vogue.

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She streaked across our television screens in fuchsia and lime, all hair and lips and eyes with those nails; you would swear you were watching a Solid Gold dancer, not the winner of three gold medals in last summer’s Olympic games.

She is Flo-Jo, the fastest and flashiest ever to come out of the starting block. She can outrun O. J. Simpson, do three thousand sit-ups at a time, as well as partial squats holding 320 pounds, all without disturbing her ladylike pearl stud earrings, and still find time to stencil tiny palm trees and sparkling things on her fingernails. Blessed with speed and style and defiant sexuality, Florence Griffith Joyner has broken down the barrier between vanity and athletic prowess and is living proof that one needn’t cancel out the other.

“You can sweat and still look nice doing it,” says Griffith Joyner, taking time out from packing for a trip to Europe to talk about her eccentric fashion sense on the track and field, an arena where she sprints into home-stretch in a grape spandex one-legger under patterned bikini bottoms, her lips glossed a high raspberry sheen. “I love bright colors,” she says. “There’s a lot of energy there. The color fires me up.”

At twenty-nine, Griffith Joyner is disciplined and direct, with a girlish laugh and a voice currently undergoing diction lessons, the promise of lucrative film and TV offers looming in her future. (There are also acting and dialogue coaches.) Her hair is often a massive tangle of black curls, her nails are expertly polished, her huge brown eyes peer out from spidery lashes, and her skin is cocoa-butter smooth. On her left hand is a diamond ring on which Brian Boitano could do figure eights. And those legs! She has thigh muscles to rival the best in the NFL, and arms like two pump-action carbines. G.I. Flo.

As a child, growing up in the projects of Los Angeles, Griffith A Joyner liked to wear hair ribbons and play dress-up. Appearance was always important. Her mother insisted her hair be combed, her face washed, tier clothes pressed. She also became devoted to a succession of Barbie dolls. “We don’t just play with those dolls,” she reflects. “They have something to do with how we feel about life and how we look at other women.” Young Dee Dee, as her family called her, escaped the pain of poverty with a fantasy world of beauty and cosmetics. “I remember doing a lot of dolls’ hair. I destroyed a lot of dolls putting my mom’s hot curlers on them. I burned up so many of them.”