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Memo to Brad Pitt: What's up with the porkpie hat and the slacker pants, fella? Are you a movie star or do you work in a record store?

Note to the former Mrs. Guy Ritchie: Time to send the shtick in to the star shop for new brake pads and another one of those trademark reinventions. Eat a cookie while you're at it, Madge. Lose the leotard.

The time for a makeover is nigh.

This is the time of year when we all flap our gums about changes we have no intention of making. Come the new year we embark on mass indulgence in fantasies that, just by willing it so, one can acquire thrifty habits, give up martinis, toss the Marlboros, eliminate the muffin top and finally finish reading Proust. Deep down we know that none of this is likely to occur.

And this is why it's such a pleasure to dispense makeover tips about everyone and everything else.

Take Madonna. For decades, the singer has been the billboard image of a shape-shifter, so much so that her makeovers risk seeming overcalculated and stale. Fans with long memories will recall that, before she dieted and exercised to the point where her ex-husband Guy Ritchie reportedly likened her to a "hunk of gristle," Madonna was a lovable and slightly chubby pop chick with a charmingly clueless taste for ripped crinolines and fingerless gloves.

She was also — no small point — the living embodiment of Picasso's observation that "mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal."

That, of course, was a dozen Madonna iterations ago. And she surely still has her fans. Joe Levy, the editor of Blender, is one of them.

"People pick on Madonna unfairly," Levy said, speaking of the star's fanatical self-transformations.

It is certainly true that, in her role as seeker and radical self-improver, Madonna has provided a shiny alternative to a pop landscape that, without her, would doom audiences of the world to the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Shakira or, shiver, Angus Young. The latter, a guitarist and founder of the Australian metal band AC/DC, has been performing in the same stage garb for almost his entire career. That is to say, he has been wearing knickers and a schoolboy cap for twice as long as Miley Cyrus, the tween moppet, has been alive.

And while we're at it, let's address Brad Pitt's headgear issues and the goofy, retro contrivance of a man who is in his 40s, a father of six and who makes more than $10 million a picture affecting a totally embarrassing proletarian look.

You're a movie star, Mr. Pitt. It says so here on the job description. You are also, as Josh Patner, a style writer for Slate and Time said, "the handsomest man in the world," and with a wife so breathtakingly lovely that even if her inked-up torso looks like a tattooist's scratch pad, she still inspires lust.

Why not dress the part?

Of course, Pitt is far from the only person in the public eye in urgent need of rescue from poor style guidance. The name Hillary Rodham Clinton somehow leaps to mind. While you would have to resort to tactics that violate the Geneva Conventions to force Clinton's advisers to admit she has been a stylist's serial patsy, there are signs all around that the secretary of state-designate has fallen into the clutches of some devious fashion Svengalis.

Despite her shifts from Hairband Hillary to feminist figurehead to what Dalton Conley, the chairman of the sociology department at New York University, calls a "shot-drinking bowler of the working class," somehow she always ends up in a pantsuit rut.

If, as Tim Gunn, the cable television personality, pointed out, Nancy Pelosi can consistently find the sweet spot of feminine style — chic and tough and alluring and rarely in peril of veering into the dominatrix territory occupied by some other highly placed political types — why must Hillary Clinton always end up looking like Bea Arthur in "Maude"?

Not, of course, that there was anything wrong with Bea Arthur in "Maude," not necessarily, but would you really want her at the nuclear disarmament table across from Kim Jong-il?

Increasingly the problem for celebrities and even political leaders (dialing Moammar Gadhafi) is that they get stuck dressing in drag, or resort to wearing shoes with higher heels than those worn by their wives (phone call for Monsieur Sarkozy) or else turn into surgical case studies, their body parts apparently chosen from novelty catalogs. They bloat their faces so extensively with Botox and Restylane that, on a visit to the Hughes Market in Malibu or a walk down Madison Avenue or even a spin through the TV dial, half the people one sees seem to have crammed soccer balls into their brassieres or chosen their features from a cat calendar.

Let's alter all that. Now that everyone is too broke to ante up for "Dr. 90210," let's bring back inner virtue, the ability to frown and also an aura of serious intention that could become the hottest, the sexiest and the most marketable of visual messages in the new atmosphere of credible change.

Let's ditch what the fashion commentator, stylist and gadfly Robert Verdi calls "the gloss and veneer of fabulosity" and offload at least some of the giddy wealth and ostentation, the label dressing and It-bag consumption of a minute ago. All that nonsense feels dowdier, clunkier and grosser than ever. The days of leaving a Sasquatch carbon footprint are behind us. Anyway, as both the year and an era simultaneously turn, that is one makeover myth we can permit ourselves to indulge.