The reading
The bead. That the world has your price tag wrong — it sees a streetwalker where there's a queen — and that the right eyes, the right dress, and your own refusal will force everyone who looked down on you to revise the number upward.
Engines
- repricing · content · spine · ~ — Vivian is held back by the world's wrong valuation: priced as disposable, snubbed on Rodeo Drive, mistaken for nothing. The whole film is the upward revision — Edward's recognition, the hotel manager's coaching, and finally her own walk-back into the snobbish boutique ("big mistake — huge") all enact the same move: the undervalued asset is correctly repriced, and the appraisers are shamed.
- being-desired · content · also-runs · ~ — the Cinderella underlayer: the unchosen woman is seen, wanted, and elevated by being desired by the powerful man, not merely revalued in the abstract.
The bundle. A repricing spine carried on a being-desired chassis — the valuation rises because she becomes wanted, so the two engines run in lockstep rather than competing.
Dual-use read. Repricing's counterfeit is the flattery that your worth is already maximal and only others' blindness withholds it — relief without the slot-2 work of actually changing. Pretty Woman mostly runs the bright pole (Vivian does choose to want more, refuses the kept-mistress offer), but it shades counterfeit-ward: the rescue and the makeover do much of the repricing for her, and the fairy-tale frame invites the viewer to feel revalued without earning it.
Verdict. The clean romantic-comedy specimen of repricing: the misappraised woman whose true value is recognized, with being-desired as the lift that does the recognizing.
Evidence. ~ reviewed — from a viewing, not subtitle-grounded (in-copyright screen work)