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Here is the finale video, with Christina Hendricks at the end talking about her favorite pieces from the collection.

“We’re really spoiled on Mad Men. Lots of television actors use the down season to go out and get creatively fulfilled, but I feel the opposite,” Christina said. “Anything else I get to do is just icing.”

As for questions about her figure, she said, “It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.” Christina continued, “Back when I was modeling, if someone said ‘I’m fasting,’ I would say, ‘Can’t we talk about something else?’”

And more from JustJared.com

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Woman of the Hourglass
Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks finds talk of her body boring. A minority opinion, to be sure. Particularly this season.

Christina Hendricks thinks all the talk about her body is a little embarrassing. It’s not as if she has an extra limb, after all. She just has an especially attractive version of the same thing women have had forever—curves—but she happens to have them in a profession where women haven’t for quite some time.

“It kind of hurt my feelings at first,” she says. “Anytime someone talks about your figure constantly, you get nervous, you get really self-conscious. I was working my butt off on the show, and then all anyone was talking about was my body!”

You can see why all the focus on how big the chest, how narrow the waist, how round the hips could drive an actor—anyone—insane, but people were only noticing Christina Hendricks’s body because they were finally noticing Christina Hendricks. Her portrayal of Joan Holloway, the complicated office queen of Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce!), on Mad Men is properly captivating for its combination of total competence and heartbreaking vulnerability. And she delivers the spectacular performance while looking extremely different from the other women we’ve grown used to seeing on television, in movies, on the covers of magazines. “It might sound silly,” she says, “but I didn’t realize I was so different. I was just oblivious. Sometimes I would go on an audition and someone would say something like, Girl, you’re refreshing! That was it.”

And it’s not Hendricks’s fault that she’s come to everyone’s attention as an actress at a time when bodies are very much an issue—if not the issue—as far as fashion is concerned. There are the various attempts by fashion cities like São Paulo and Milan to police model weight; there are press conferences, BMI restrictions, mandatory turkey sandwiches backstage at every show. But lately there have also been baby steps taken toward the (unfortunately) radical idea that looking good need not involve so much rejection of the naturally occurring female shape. Glamour has begun to mix models of various sizes into its regular editorial shoots. A recent issue of V concerned itself with shape, pointing out that clothes—even fashion clothes—can look good on differently sized people.

But too often the size discussion becomes almost grotesque, as if the only alternative to being as lean as a skinless Perdue chicken breast is to veer wildly (and unhealthily) in the opposite direction (Gabourey Sidibe, Beth Ditto). One can’t help wonder if the fashion world’s obsession with those two women, both of whom deserve prominent coverage for their talent first and foremost, isn’t in some sense overcompensation, an attempt to atone for the terribly thin models who still hold sway everywhere. Either way, it becomes a game of extremes.

There is a spectacular other path. And Hendricks working the Emmy’s red carpet in formfitting L’Wren Scott is terrific PR for the opinion that Hollywood success should not be determined by one’s ability to Pilates one’s hips up, off, and away. None of this is meant to suggest that Hendricks is big. She is not. (That the New York Times seemed to endorse a stylist’s description of her as “a big girl” in its coverage of the Golden Globes was mystifying and strange.) It is also not to suggest that her figure is attainable to the average duck. She looks the way movie stars used to look. She is, in that sense, proof of how certain bodies go in and out of fashion.

It is perhaps ironic then that Hendricks actually started out as a model—catalogues, mostly, but there was one season on the London runway that ended when her agent said, “Darling, did your boobs grow?” (One imagines that future seasons might see the question posed in the opposite direction.) Now, she is a fully working actor, with three new films in the can and several more under consideration. Curiously, she keeps getting called in to audition for roles as the mothers of people she isn’t nearly old enough, at 34, to have birthed—which has a lot to do with what she wears on TV. “The way we dress on Mad Men is so associated with old photographs, with people’s parents and grandparents,” she says. “In person, I wear jeans and flip-flops and people are so shocked. They tell me I look so much younger than they expected.”

Work on a new season of Mad Men is about to begin. “We’re really spoiled on Mad Men,” she says. “Lots of television actors use the down season to go out and get creatively fulfilled, but I feel the opposite. Anything else I get to do is just icing.”

As for the body question, she’ll answer it when asked, but mostly it bores her. “It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth,” she says. “Back when I was modeling, if someone said ‘I’m fasting,’ I would say, ‘Can’t we talk about something else?’”

© NY Mag

She’s driving men mad with her curves has a girlish vulnerability and chip-free scarlet nail polish. Her hemline is never anything other than modest, but she has a pair of breasts which, even under a woollen jumper, look like two zeppelins storming towards the finish line, writes Jane Graham.

She is Mad Men’s Joan Holloway and, as many of the show’s fans will tell you, she is one of the most divine creations on God’s flatscreen.

Mad Men, the third series of which is currently running on BBC2, is an American drama about the lives and loves of workers in an advertising agency in the early 1960s. Intelligent, classy and sharp, Mad Men is many things but most of all it is a brilliant study of the contradictions of the time it is set in. This is a period in history when social and political waves were rushing at each other from opposite directions, on the cusp of the tsunami of Vietnam and sexual liberation. Social propriety is still key — divorce is frowned on, as are short skirts, drunk females, working mums and swearing.

No one, however, thinks anything of a respected company boss blacking up like Al Jonson to sing at a garden party for wealthy genteels, or speaks out against a rich husband and father booking his regular Wednesday afternoon trysts with his mistress.

The inhabitants of the Mad Men universe talk about heritage, legacy and American values, but fight ruthlessly to secure clients who want to knock down historical monuments and replace them with hotel and entertainment complexes.

In the middle of all of these contradictions, these incongruous urges, is the agency’s office manager Joan Holloway, played by Christina Hendricks. And Joan is the greatest, and most beguiling ambiguity of all.

A committed and dutiful worker, her Jessica Rabbit figure is the biggest cause of distraction in the building. She is flawlessly groomed from head to toe, and does a mean line in cupcakes and pastries, but she’s also got an edge like a razor, and some great one-liners up her sleeve. She giggles in a sisterly style with the girls, then walks through the office with a wiggle which would tear any red-blooded man from his new bride’s side in a breathless moment.

Her voice is as light and girlish as Disney’s Snow White but she speaks with the brisk, clear confidence of Susan Sarandon. If Mad Men is, as is often claimed, where style meets substance, Joan Holloway must be the moment of collision.

Joan is an absolute master stroke from Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. At first glance she is a classic American siren, with the shiny red mane of Rita Heyworth, the killer curves of Marilyn Monroe, the self-possession of Ava Gardner and the enigmatic smile — half Bambi, half hooker — of Twin Peaks’ Sherilyn Fenn.

Her respectable pencil skirts, perfectly coiffured hair and hourglass silhouette make her a devastating combination of demure and verging on illegal, as if she’s tried her best to contain her body, but it just keeps on betraying her.

I often imagine her stepping into a local library, maybe the lobby of The Europa, or even better, the chamber of Stormont — what chaos this blinding visage of colour, light, beauty and sex would cause!

But Weiner was too ambitious to make his regular characters mere one-note signifiers. Joan is much more complex than that.

Increasingly torn between a job she enjoys and is good at — she is queen bee in the agency — and the lure of domestic married baby-bound bliss, she represents modern women more convincingly than any character in the programme. While she has accepted with dignity the injustices typical of her times, such as being overlooked for a promotion in preference for a far less capable man, and has now married a man who raped her, Joan is no walkover. “I don’t want to argue,” states her husband forcibly. “Stop talking then,” she replies crisply.

The mistakes Joan has made with men — and her none too perfect union with current husband Greg Harris — have given her anxieties as compelling as any of the men in the series, and those men are some of the best-drawn figures on American television.

The story goes that Weiner originally only aimed to bring Joan into the show briefly but due to Christina Hendricks’s ‘on-screen magnetism’, the decision was made to flesh her out properly, and keep her in for the long haul. Rarely can a televisual re-think have proved more salutary.

Like all the best female characters, Joan is as adored by women as she is by men — both in the fictional and in the real world. The reasons that men love her don’t need to be spelled out here. But women’s responses are just as strong, perhaps even stronger.

Despite Joan’s acceptance of some rules that many women today would find distasteful — she demurs to men when it comes to matters of business and technology and regards her allure as her best asset, regularly giving her girlfriends advice on how maximise theirs — she is also an immensely empowering creature for a woman to watch.

It’s fun seeing her turn imposing egotistical patriarchs into jelly and verbally, Joan can spar with any man, and takes pleasure in doing so. Her bad luck with men has made her endearingly vulnerable, and her soft warmth means we’re rooting for her.

She has a fleshy, healthy body that normal women can relate to, and it’s comforting to be so readily convinced that this — and not the bony waifs we constantly see in our magazines — is what really turns the opposite sex on. Saying that, even the fashion magazines love Joan; her beautifully cut clothes — always in the most vivid red, the richest green — have made her their darling.

As luck would have it, one of Joan’s most fabulous scenes is in a recent episode (episode 3.3) and you can still watch it on BBC IPlayer. Joan and her husband Greg are hosting a dinner party, during which Joan’s excellent manners, free and easy friendliness and two-tier cake tray have impressed all of the guests. So much so that Joan is beginning to suspect that her new husband is not as respected by his peers as she first imagined.

Greg begins to goad Joan into ‘playing something’. After politely brushing him off a few times she surrenders and Greg goes off to fetch her … accordion! There’s an element of pure parody to this revelation of yet another of Joan’s talents — is she, you wonder, going to finish the night by doing the splits while tap-dancing in rollerskates?

But something magical happens when she gets up to play the fluffy little Cole Porter song, C’est Magnifique. Maybe it’s her defiant but coquettish delivery of Cole Porter’s peppy French lyrics or the way her eyes flash with anger while she simultaneously takes on an air of puppyish playfulness, but the sensuality and poignancy Joan — or perhaps Hendricks’ — brings to the unexpected performance of an ode to marriage by a disappointed wife makes for TV gold dust. It’s an unforgettable scene, as funny and strange as it is mesmerising.

For anyone who marvelled at the formidable CJ throwing her jacket off and purring her way lasciviously though The Jackal in The West Wing all those years ago, trust me — this is as good. Where Joan is concerned, it’s all good.

The critics love it, but who else is watching?

It’s one of the most talked about TV shows of the age, with critics raving about its drama, glamour and questionable morals — yet relatively few people here actually tune in to watch Mad Men.

Largely, that’s due to its scheduling — 10pm on BBC Four.

Those who do make the effort to tune in, however, tend to become instant converts, immediately intent on spreading the message about this multi-award-winning US drama.

Its creator Matthew Weiner has admitted: “I didn’t want Mad Men just to be about glamour, but ugliness too.”

And it seems the heady mix of both means that Mad Men has proved equally seductive to men and women viewers.

With its provocative dialogue (“Have we ever hired any Jews?” “Not on my watch”) and super-sexy women in so-tight pencil skirts, this is, as one reviewer put it, “full-bodied lifestyle porn”.

Season three has just started, so what are you waiting for?

© Belfast Telegraph