Fergie (the Pea, not the duchess)

So, Monday night, Heather and I were watching some sort of New Year's Eve Countdown Blah Blah Blah Thingie, on which Fergie appeared, and we confessed to each other over our champagne flutes that she has been looking SO adorable lately and has hardly shown up wearing tartan hot pants to anything, and now I guess it turns out we kind of like her and think she's cute.

Well, Australian Cosmo is trying its damnedest to undo all that goodwill:

A) How OLD is that picture? B) How MUCH do they hate her? C) Going down on him could give me WHAT?

All that sex-related rumor-mongering aside (apparently, in addition to giving us cancer, our boyfriends are all tracking us on some creepy website. Is one of the suggested 10 Ways to Feel More Confident Naked, "don't read any other article in this magazine"?), Cosmo's agenda this month is clearly squashing Miss Fergie Ferg's stylistic upswing like a nasty little silverfish. This picture doesn't look remotely like her, AND she's been dressed like a cashier at Forever XXI, but without the benefit of getting fifteen percent off clothes that are already essentially free. Look, I know old Fergs is busy calling all the people who made fun of her for peeing herself and for the meth thing and cackling about her impending nuptials to Josh "Smokin'" Duhamel  and all the mad piles of cash she made this year and how good her legs are (I'm sure my phone will ring eventually), but once she's done with that, maybe she should call her lawyer and see if she can sue for this sort of thing. It's certainly caused ME some emotional distress.

Aw, that's right, Fergie Ferg, take a bow.

It seems so long ago now that she was running around town dressed like Pippi Longstocking on a bender. If you'd told me then that I'd be patting Fergie on the back for looking like a lovely lady at a posh event, I'd have laughed and suggested that you stop using Elmer's Glue as nasal spray. Sure, the matchy satin shoes are a bit bridesmaidy, but that's splitting hairs when you consider that we used to be lucky if she even brushed her tresses. The dress color is so pretty on her and the cut is flattering, and her coif is shiny... maybe Josh Duhamel is finally using his hotness to bring her up to his level. Or maybe one night in the middle of a lasagna cookoff in their shared kitchen, Fergie dropped a colander of flat noodles and gasped, "OH MY GOD, WAIT, OLIVER! WASN'T A FASHION SHOW, WAS IT?!?" At which point Josh swept her into his arms, carried her up to the bedroom, and gently laid her down... on the floor of her closet, where they proceeded to make sweet, sweet Goodwill piles.

At any rate, Happy Holidays to us, because I get to use the word "lovely" to refer to her without having to follow it with the hugely unsexy "lady lumps" epithet.

"Oh, shit," Fergie thinks, mid-song.

"I'm still wearing those pleated denim bloomers, aren't I? This is almost as bad as the time I...well, let's not bring that up again."

In theory, we're all for celebrities acting like normal people and wearing something more than once. In practice, though, there are things like high-waisted overalls, which fall distinctly into the "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" category of fashion.

Such was the affliction I thought had grabbed Fergie in its toxic clutches.

And then, with a heavy heart, I realized this is not the same pair of camel-toe-causing high-waisted overalls. Which means... it's hard to put this in print, because that means it's real... there are TWO types of vagina-crunching, waist-pinching, armpit-encroaching denim overalls in the world. Judging by Fergie's face, this one is particularly likely to have been dumped on an unsuspecting public by the same people who bring you Monistat. [Miss Fergie Ferg must be seriously reconsidering the creative decision to peddle her latest single dressed as a farmhand.]

Unless her apparently misery has to do with how tightly the belt is cinched, at which point the suspenders become merely decorative. Yes, that's right: They're IMITATION lady-cave-spelunking high-waisted overalls. I'm not sure which is the more insidious creation; all I do know is, it just got a little bit less safe for us out there. 

Photography, at least in The World According to Tyra Banks, is all about angles. [Supplementary cautionary texts for the lesson: All my personal albums.]

So in theory, for a magazine cover shoot, one would want to find the best angle possible on the subject's face, so that when the photo is blown up on a cover and gazing at the masses from newsstands everywhere, the aforementioned masses do not immediately become huddled masses yearning to breathe free of the fearsome visage of Celebrity X.

Unfortunately for Fergie, I think the Seventeen photographer who shot her for the June cover flat-out gave up on her.

First, though, consider the Rolling Stone cover she graced last fall:

I actually like this picture -- yes, the hand positioning looks really unnatural and uncomfortable, like a finger-gun she's about to lock and load, but overall she looks kind of dirty-hot. Her nose looks delicate. She's pouty. She's got the smoky-eye thing going on, and her hair looks fantastic. In all, it's a pretty solid effort, and she makes me wish I had cause to wear tiaras more often.

Now have a gander at what Seventeen did to her.

Much has been made about Fergie Ferg's song "Pedestal," in which she delivers what she imagines is a scathing criticism of a blogger, or all bloggers amalgamated into one Symbolic Blogger, for saying things about her from behind the safety of a computer screen.

And while we can understand why that's frustrating, the root of the problem is that she just gives us so much fodder. From publicly wetting herself to her myriad fashion crimes to things like the shirt she wore out in public that we fugged yesterday, there's just so much darn fodder there.

Such as the sequel to yesterday's photo, which we like to call Exhibit C-Cup.

Giving credit where credit is due, Fergie came across as fairly sweet on The View the other day -- when you get her in full conversational flow, she drops that idiotic street-talk cadence she adopts everywhere else, and so she actually seems sort of human. Maybe even regular.

If you close your eyes, that is. Because half the time she's running around in stuff like this, which just makes me laugh, shake my head, admire her abs (again -- due credit) , and then shudder and laugh again.

This whole decision that her debut as The Dutchess (why the stray T, Fergie Ferg? Are you shouting out to all your peeps in The Netherlands? Holla back, Amsterdam!) requires folding her clothes in half strikes me as a bit hilarious. This is not the first time she's done it -- you may recall she wore a white shirt and tie this way at the VMAs, when she performed her single. Which by the way was so wrong for The View that I could only cringe in empathetic embarrassment while she was grinding and bouncing around, and I silently thanked God that Baba Wawa wasn't there to see it, because knowing she was there somehow would have made the experience even more discomfiting for me.

Anyway. With shirts like this, Fergie reminds me of a very awkward pre- or early-teen standing in front of the mirror and tucking her shirts up under her bra in idiotic configurations, just to see what wearing a belly-shirt would feel like. I think a lot of girls did that when they were younger; I certainly did. First you tuck it under your bra outright, then when you realize that is not going to work, you try that thing where you bunch it all into one long tail, pull it up and under your bra, and then yank the tail out the neck hole. This looks completely idiotic but it kept the shirt up; the whole strange enterprise was a rite of passage of sorts, I think. I never did it because I particularly wanted to wear a belly shirt (okay, sometimes maybe there was an air of, "Could I... could I maybe... possibly...?" but it was always followed by an immediate return to consciousness along the lines of, "Wait, no, sweet God, no, the world is not ready for my negative-six pack") but, well, Madonna wore belly shirts, and anything Madonna did sartorially was pretty bodacious -- except maybe for the conic bras -- and worth trying to imitate in the privacy of your own home.

I stress: in privacy of your own home. Fergie Ferg, it is never, ever a flattering or attractive idea to tuck a shirt under your bra -- or look as if you have -- unless perhaps somebody is about to operate on your stomach and a very attractive person is holding your hand, wiping the delicately attractive sweat of pain off your brow, and staring into your eyes while whispering that there is No Other Way.

In conclusion, her shirts are silly, and I have revealed too much. 

The last time I wrote about Fergie, I bid temporary adieu to The Fug, which she had banished from her closet long enough to show up at the Poseidon premiere without eliciting any snide "sinking ship" comparisons.

But I think we all knew, deep down, that she wouldn't be kept down for long; buoyed by the sheer atrocity of her idiotic ditty that's currently marauding its way to the top of the pop charts, the Duchess of Fugsylvania is on her way back.

This ensemble is one part Annette Funicello, one part Sandy from Grease in the end when she turns slutty for Danny Zuko and that makes everything okay, and two parts Hot Topic's Krayzee Sum'r Clozeout Clearance Sale!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And to that I say, no thanks, troll. Your London London Bridge can go down all on its own, Fergie Ferg.

I'm not happy about what I'm about to do.

This whole thing reminds me of the deal with me and wedges. When wedges came back in, I hated them. They seemed so '70s to me, and not in a way I wanted to revisit. For some reason they struck such a visceral chord of distaste within me. I liked my heels separate from my shoes, and I really didn't like them made from something that's better served plugging a wine bottle until I'm ready to open it. "I am NOT buying a wedge, I don't care HOW hard Lucky and Steve Madden try to push me," I proclaimed on more than one occasion. "And don't even get me STARTED on those damn espadrilles that are coming in again."

Well, of course, then I started accidentally admiring wedges on people, and making tiny exceptions to my firm anti-wedge stance. And then suddenly I owned something sort of wedgey, and poof, fast-forward to April, when I bought some espadrille-wedgey things that tie around the ankle for my honeymoon and I had to check with my friend Carrie that I wasn't crazy and that they didn't look all that vile, and she confirmed they really were cute on, and suddenly there I was with a fusion of two hated things burning a hole in my suitcase. I felt dirty. And I wore them constantly when I was away.

I thought of this when the following photo flashed across my computer screen this morning.

Will you look at that? Fergie looks... classy. And pretty. The dress fits her in the most flattering places, she accessorized it really tastefully, her hair looks washed and brushed, there are no horrid little braids or formal shorts or C-3PO boots in sight, she appears momentarily sober and able to stand upright under her own power... in the immortal words of Wentworth Miler on Ellen, "Brava, brava."

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

I grappled with this all morning. Was this the first step down a treacherous, slippery Fergie slope? Would I wake up in a month unfugging her all over the place and saying to myself, "You know, she does rock a 24-inch zipper on her shorts"? Would Jessica try to talk some sense into me, leading to me locking myself in my bedroom with copies of Us Weekly out of which I would lovingly cut photos of Fergie, knowing it was just her and me against the world -- a cold, cruel world that didn't understand legwarmers and pants-wettings? Would she have to tie me to a tree and stage an intervention, a carefrontation, in which all my friends baited me until I broke and then patched me back together again?

Then I realized that I've held strong against the Black-Eyed Peas for their entire gnawing existence. I've been tough on leggings. I won't stand for dresses over pants. And my crusade against overlong pants that eat a girl's feet has marched on with vigor. So there's no reason to think Fergie will break me -- Fergie, the bane (and, therefore, the life-giving manna) of much of GFY's existence. There's no reason to think she'll weaken my resolve. And there's no reason to think that when I go see Poseidon, I will suddenly find myself weeping inconsolably when she is (please please please please) crushed by a falling piano.

And thusly, I slapped some sense into myself, because so few bid a lasting adieu to The Fug and certainly Fergie won't be that kind of pioneer. It felt right to be strong and give credit where credit is due. So congratulations, Josh Duhamel, you kept her clean and pretty for the duration of the pre-premiere red carpet. I salute you. If you can keep up this good work, we can finally go out for that romantic dinner you've always been after. Okay? Great.

Fergie would like to join the legions of celebrities who use a red-carpet appearance to demonstrate that everything is fine, and peace is, like, the shit:

And indeed, everything is fine: She is still scary, and still sartorially confused (is she fox hunter? An 18-year old? A pregnant snowboarder? Who can say), and that's the way we like it. That's how we know the world is spinning properly on its axis.

She does appear to have learned one lesson, though: that dark pants are a safer fashion choice, because they are more apt to hide any, ahem, wet spots. Perhaps that's why she's flashing the peace sign -- because she's come to terms with her incontinence.