Ashlee & Jessica Simpson

Okay, Ashlee. It's great that you're in love -- seriously, we're all very happy for you, given what a muscular streak of misery your sister usually turns into when she's not in the tabloids hiding behind her hair while a dude pulls her around by the hand. So, be happy.

But why does love have to equal Repetitive Headgear Syndrome?

[Photo: Splash News]

We respect that, since Pete Wentz stopped so graciously telling the press that you two would only be a great love story in another lifetime and started allowing himself to be photographed wrapped all around your waist, you might be content taking a backseat for a while during his band's tour. But I feel like 7 times out of 10 that I've seen you two together lately -- usually in the pages of one of the gossip rags that winks up at me from my doorstep every week -- you have your noggin stuffed inside a fedora. (The other three times, your head is free as a bird but your hair clearly hasn't been brushed in 72 hours -- although I'm pleased to see you have at least taken a comb to it in recent memory here -- and 10 times out of 10, you are hiding half of your face somewhere in the vicinity of Pete's right ear.)

What gives, Simpson the Younger? Does Pete yank out your hair in the heat of passion? Do you just bump your head a lot? Did Ken Paves screw up your weave? If it's that last one, there ARE other hairdressers. Just because he is your sister's only friend doesn't mean you have to pay him to make your hair look so limp that you hide under a hat all the time. Free yourself.

And she's back! After a brief hiatus while she was dating John Mayer and simultaneously was accosted with my favorite headline ever, namely, "IT'S NOT A FAT SUIT," my nemesis Jessica Simpson is BACK.  (I like to have a nemesis at all times. For a while it was a woman I worked with [NOT HEATHER] who used to correct my grammar all the time, except she'd change it so that it was WRONG. Another time it was my landlord, who charged me for DEPRECIATION ON THE WASHING MACHINE. That ass. And then, of course, there was Paul Giamatti. HE KNOWS WHAT HE DID.) But Jessica Simpson is my favorite nemesis, because she's always doing totally dumb stuff.  Sure, I suppose it's exciting to have a brilliant, Lord Voldemort-y nemesis, because it challenges you and all that, but I'm lazy. It's so much easier to have a nemesis who's likely to hoist herself on her own petard. In fact, I suspect her petard is exactly what Jessica is hoisting in the cover shot below:

Why else would she have her arm all stuck up in the air like that, in what might be the most AWKWARD-looking cover I have EVER SEEN? The good people at Glossed Over (also not fans of this cover) swears that J Simp is holding a bundle of balloons, and I'm sure that's true. What's also true is that they appear to be about ready to rip her arm right out of its socket.  It doesn't even look like HER arm. Hell, it barely looks like AN arm. She looks like she just happened to wander in front of a narrow, flesh-colored pillar. (There's a dirty, easy joke in there, isn't there? I'll give you a moment to make it to yourself.) She also sort of looks like she's got fangs, a development I never noticed before. With the new darker hair and the new sharper teeth, is she a vampire now? And shouldn't that information be on the cover? Hell, I'd totally buy a magazine that promised "A Look Inside Jessica's Dark New Blood-Sucking World."

Remember Ryan Cabrera? He dated Ashlee Simpson for a while? Mostly while her TV show (what the heck what that show called? The Ashlee Simpson Show? Ashlee!? The Ashlee Simpson Hour of Power? You'd think I'd remember, as I used to watch it religiously thanks to the fact that I had bad taste) was on the air. You know, this guy:

He sang that song "On the Way Down," which until about three minutes ago I thought was called "All the Way Down," and which is apparently...not about what I thought it was about.  Anyway, it was kind of a catchy tune, although the kid is no Tyler Hilton, let me tell you, and despite having a penchant for making wacky faces for the camera and SERIOUSLY WORKED OVER HAIR, he didn't seem like a bad kid:

Wow. I mean...wow. That hair look some WORK. There is a LOT of product in there, and I'd be interested to know how many CHI ceramic flat irons lost their lives in the heroic struggle to get it to stand up like that. Anyhoozy, you'll be interested to know that Mr Cabrera has -- perhaps due to an incident in which his mother and manager staged an intervention along with Ryan's close personal friends from Robinson Beautilities --  abandoned this labor-intensive look for something more....natural:

Poor, poor, poor Jessica Simpson. Seriously.  She went from being America's ditzy sweetheart to having her picture on the cover of Star with the headline, "JESSICA SIMPSON: IT'S NOT A FAT SUIT" splashed across it.  That's rough, dude.  And then she and John Mayer broke up (again) (maybe he LIKES fat suits?) and then allegedly she and Ashlee had a fight about how Ashlee is hot or something now? (I don't remember what they're fighting about, but supposedly they're feuding.)  And while her ex is rolling around the Bahamas with his girlfriend, she's at Cannes having fully completed her transformation into Depressive Dead Eyed Wax Figure:

This is usually the place where I say something like, "she's a beautiful girl, but why does she look so monochromatic?" But actually, I suspect that I know why she's so monochromatic: she's in the middle of going from brown hair back to blonde, which is why she currently looks beige all over. (Though that doesn't excuse how lank her extensions look. Has she also broken up with Ken Paves? The loss of a girl's gay OR her hairdresser can be more traumatic than losing her boyfriend, so in the interest of preventing J Simp from having a Britney-style melt-down, I sincerely hope she has not lost the both in one) So instead I will ask why she's dressing like a 50 year old extra from that episode of Dynasty where they go to the Carousel Ball and hang out with Gerald Ford. Her jewels are beautiful, of course, but overall, she looks like the human version of a Judith Leiber bag.

Listen, girl, there's no lost love between us, but you're REALLY YOUNG still. And single. And in France. And I know you're probably sad that you're in France with your weird Dad and not some cute boy, but you've got to man up and work it right now. Star magazine insinuated that you were so fat that you might be COVERED IN LATEX (which is patently absurd, albeit hilarious).  So DO NOT leave the house dressed like a handbag. Just don't.

I so wish I had been a fly buzzing around Anna Wintour's champagne flute when she first spotted Jessica Simpson at the Met's Costume Institute Ball Gala hoo-ha last night. Because, honey, it seems that while our backs were turned, J. Simp went a little overboard. On everything:

This is one of those dresses that someone with small boobs could fully rock, and I like the brown hair, but overall the effect kind of veers into Blow-Up Doll category, which is really both rather grim and also not entirely unexpected when you consider the source.  But when you're carrying around that kind of (real and admittedly spectacular) rack, you can't just strap 'em in and bounce off like that, especially to a formal event. What if the right one makes a run for the border, in front of everyone? What if the Power of the Cleav mesmerizes the cater waiter and he walks into a pole, dropping caviar everyone and giving himself a black eye, therefore totally RUINING his upcoming audition for All My Children?  What if the left one is done permanent damage by the pressure of being wedged in like that and never lies down properly in a bikini top again? What if one of them pops out and hits Anna Wintour right in the bob? A girl could NEVER live that down. Hasn't Jess been through enough already?

However, I've got to give John Mayer props for working a Johnny Depp-type thing:

I wonder if Kate Moss made a play for him over the crudite.  Can you imagine the tabloid headlines?  Can you imagine the catfight? I've got five bucks on Jess. She is NOT going though another messy public break-up if she can help it, and if that requires hair-pulling, I think she's got the chops.

Dear Readers,

I'm going to do something we don't do very often around this parts, and fug someone despite not having the picture at our immediate disposal (for reasons both boring and technical). But, truly, you should be grateful that you can't see Jessica Simpson's new high waisted (PLEATED!!) pants.

Are you back? Can you still see? I'm so sorry for inflicting that on you. It's bad, right?  All the fashion mags have been panting over the the high-waisted pant for the last few months ("Oh, they make your legs look longer! Oh, no, seriously! Seriously, they look awesome! We promise, you'll WEAR THEM. WEAR THEM. WEAR THESE $2400 HIGH WAISTED PANTS.") and while I am THRILLED that the era of mad crazy low rise is over,  J Simp's Doom-Trousers are a sterling example of how very hard it is for someone who is not built like a model to pull off pants that essentially come up to your pits. If you've got boobs AT ALL, super-high-waisted pants pose a problem. Because you look...sorta stumpy in them, all boobs and then PANTS PANTS PANTS PANTS. And while I treasure pants, and love pants, and want to MAKE love to pants and regularly request that people consider pants, THESE pants are an assault to the concept of pants. 

AND TO HUMANITY.

So, readers, when you're standing there between the mannequins at Bloomingdale's or Macy's or Filene's or Barney's or Target or Banana Republic or J. Crew or Forever 21 or where ever pants are sold, and you find yourself thinking, "Huh. I'm totally going to try on these high-waisted, pleated pants,"  do not let me stop you. I would never prevent a fellow shopper from trying anything on. "Just try it ON" is my mantra. Sometimes things look better on you than they do on the hanger! And maybe you will look super hot in high-waisted pleated pants. I mean, you're pretty hot to begin with. So it's possible. But if you try them on and then suddenly feel like you've gained ten pounds in the walk from the display to the dressing room, DON'T BLAME YOURSELF.

Think of J Simp, and blame the pants.

So, I guess Ashlee Simpson is the spokesperson for Skechers now?

"You know what the Kids Today are like,"  the ad exec who put this ad together -- let's call her Alison Parker -- might have said.  "They LOVE to sit around, buying stuff on the internets, wearing knickers! Sometimes, they just toss on a kicky vest and manage to levitate their CD into thin air! It's awesome. Sometimes -- if they're super cool -- their faces start to look kind of eerily like the skulls on their knit caps! And they all wear SKECHERS, a brand that looks totally, totally, freakishly misspelled the more closely you look at it! They're going to love this ad!"

Poor Assica. So unprepared was she for the exertions of being The Favored Simpson, she completely forgot to wash her hair and have Ken Paves rip out her ratty extensions. Which is why Joe should never have allowed her to stand next to somebody who probably has two shampooers, three professional weaveologists, and six personal hairbrushing lackeys on her staff.

Ms. Knowles, on the other hand, has made the intriguing style choice of borrowing her pumps from a West Hollywood impersonator named Beshlongce, who we imagine croons tributes like "Bootyvicious," "Humpin'," "Saliver," and "Rim the Alarm" while dancing on top of a Cadillac parked outside Rage.

She is also apparently beginning to see some advantages to gallavanting around town in buttock-length skirts:

Oh my God.

We knew she was depressed, but taking the veil seems to be a bit drastic.

Listen, Jess: The Sound of Music was just a movie.  You can not enter a convent in the hopes that the Mother Superior will dispatch you off to a mansion, where the man of the house -- a deliciously stern military man -- will fall in love with your moxie and musical skills. That doesn't actually happen all that often. Try Match.com or something first, okay?

The repeat offenders just keep on coming.

Hopefully, instead of diving asshead-first into one of his monologues, Dane Cook is actually explaining to the crowd and to Jessica Simpson that unless she is auditioning for the Women In Waders 2007 wall calendar, or indeed wading through the detritus of her fake relationships, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH with the past-the-knee boots over jeans. Especially when you take into account that she's wearing them with a cropped blazer, which is so ill-proportioned compared with the rest of what she's wearing that it looks like she shrank it in an attempt to Brave Little Soldier her way through a load of laundry.

Of course, the way our luck runs with these things, he's not saying anything of the sort, choosing instead to delve into of his truly groundbreaking, intelligent bits about Burger King. Which... look, as long as he's not repeating his tired and terrible opening monologue from last week's Saturday Night Live (in which he attempted to infuse suicide with dark comedy in a way that would make the entire cast of Heathers bury themselves in unison just so they could spin in their graves, then thoughtfully repeated the joke at length in case we didn't yawn sufficiently the first time), then we'll consider it a victory of sorts.