Blog to book has rarely been a successful transition. Blogs are, almost by definition, drive-by reading. With “Go Fug Yourself Presents the Fug Awards” (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $19.95), however, the women who run the well-regarded celebrity fashion blog use an awards-show metaphor to capture the oh-no-she-didn’t spirit of Go Fug Yourself, but with shelf life.
The authors of book and blog are Heather Cocks, 30, and Jessica Morgan, 32, former reality-TV producers who founded the Los Angeles-based site (go fugyourself.com) in mid-2004 in the belief that making fun of celebrity fashion needn’t be a solitary pursuit or limited to awards shows. The blog has grown so big that they both derive livings from it and rarely have to explain any longer that “Fug” derives from “fugly,” itself a combination of “ugly” and, as their “FAQ” page demurely claims, “frightfully.”
On the occasion of the book’s publication, the Oscars and America’s apparently ongoing appetite for celebrity tidbits, I “talked” (via e-mail) to Cocks and Morgan about Cameron Diaz, leg warmers and Chloe Sevigny’s angry fictional brother, to name three.
S.J.: So what are you wearing right now? Be honest.
H.C.: Prepare to be shocked, but for my glamorous stay-at-home job, I am wearing 7 [For All Mankind] jeans and a T-shirt that says, “To hell with straight hair.” In defense of my at-home fashions: I have a 10-pace commute and one co-worker who lives across town.
J.M.: I’m wearing black Converse, True Religion jeans and a black turtleneck.
S.J.: Do you feel a certain pressure when you go out in public, though? I mean, what if Cameron Diaz were to see you and blog about your, say, hand-knit leg warmers?
J.M.: I certainly don’t want to go out looking like I recently suffered a head injury and have totally lost my mind. But that was a priority before we even thought of the blog! But just as I assume Cameron Diaz doesn’t really mind too terribly if I hate her pants or what have you, I feel like she would be likewise totally entitled to hate my theoretical hand-knit leg warmers.
H.C.: We all want to look cute when we’re in public; we don’t all succeed all the time, and that’s that. The difference is that when we flop, we’re not doing it in spite of a huge bank account, a stylist and designers throwing free clothes at us. It’s why we don’t Fug so-called “regular people.” The fun is in seeing people who seem to have all the resources in the world screw it up, and saying to ourselves, “Seriously, if I had her stylist and her wardrobe budget, I would look hot.”
S.J.: There has been a heaviness to celebrity blogging lately, a sense of impending danger or doom. You could argue that it’s the specific personalities — Britney, Lindsay, etc. — but do you think the ever greedy blogosphere (and, of course, its readers) bears some responsibility for these slow-motion downfalls?
H.C.: Celebrities have been on downward spirals for years before the Internet even entered the conversation, though. Drew Barrymore was in rehab back when Lindsay was just a glint in the milkman’s eye. Think John Belushi, Chris Farley, Dana Plato, Todd Bridges … all this stuff was happening; it’s just that there weren’t as many internationally accessible outlets for reporting on it.
For every Lindsay, there’s a Natalie Portman or a Rachel McAdams, who manage to live comparatively quietly despite the blog boom.
Britney is such an odd case; the fact that Britney knows people are watching, and that she is reacting to that knowledge with these sorts of repeated displays, indicates to me what a troubled person she is, and not that the blogosphere has brought down a pop princess.
S.J.: So what do you say when someone comes up and says: “I’m Jimmy Sevigny. I’m gonna beat you up because you’re so mean to my sister, Chloe”?
J.M.: I think I’d tell Jimmy that I’m pretty sure Chloe can defend herself.
H.C.: Mostly, the people who bother to write are very nice. We got an e-mail from the divine Laura Bennett from “Project Runway,” saying she was beyond thrilled she’d been Fugged for her Emmy dress last September. But my very favorite was from a “Random Fug” who was furious because she didn’t think she qualified as “Random” at all because she’d done extensive work on some DirecTV channel or other and was clearly therefore very successful. Too funny.
S.J.: So you recently Fugged the Academy Awards. How would you sum up this year’s event? What was the worst dress?
H.C.: My personal worst is either Rebecca Miller — she’s Daniel Day-Lewis’ wife, and she showed up with what looked like a door knocker on her chest — or Cameron Diaz, who just looked lazy and rumpled and tragic.
J.M.: For me, I think the worst dress belonged to Ellen Page. I liked what she was going for in theory — something sort of relaxed and vintage-y and cool — but in practice, she looked a bit frumpy, I thought.
S.J.: Tell me, please, how you started the blog and how it got big. Was there a moment, a post, a link that kicked it into overdrive?
H.C.: I wish I could say that we had a stroke of genius one day about a gaping hole in the blogosphere, but actually, the blog started almost by accident. We’ve been friends for years, and one day we were doing some shopping, and we kept being confronted by this movie poster for a teen flick called “Sleepover” on which every single featured person looked wonky-eyed or badly dressed, or both.
So we started joking that, clearly, fugly is the new pretty and that we’d have to start a blog to document this new and magical trend. So we did.
We figured it was an inside joke that we’d just have fun with for a while, but then Defamer found us about a month into things, and some friends of ours from Television Without Pity threw us a link here and there in their recaps. Our traffic started ticking up from there. We got really lucky with the whole word-of-mouth thing.
S.J.: And how long do you see this lasting? Does it go on and on like the — ahem — newspaper industry? Do you hire writers at some point so you can devote more time to pina coladas?
J.M.: We do like a nice fruity drink. Seriously, I don’t think either of us is ready to hand the site over to other writers in the near future. As far as the far future goes, we’ve done pretty well so far taking things as they come, so I guess the plan is to not have a plan.
H.C.: Fortunately, I’m pretty sure celebrities will be wrapping themselves in insanity from now until the end of time.
