Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen

Let's get one thing straight:  I actually don't dislike what either one of them is wearing.

The long hair and the flowing sleeves and goth-y eye make-up and impenetrable expressions make them look like priestesses in an arty film set in the Middle Ages, during which one of them  would spend a lot of time flitting around a turret holding crystal breakers full of mysterious and possibly dangerous potions. She would wear shoes lined in fur, and a crystal around her neck. The other would play a sort of charismatic, seductive temptress who sleeps with men in order to get a sample of their DNA so as to help her sister create a potion that will allow them to rule the world.  She would spend a lot of time naked, and carrying a serpent. Men would know that she was likely to kill them after having her way with them, but they would take off their capes and doublets and submit to her wiles anyway. It would all be very dramatic, and the absolute opposite of what you would expect from Michelle and Michelle Tanner.  I kind of like it, even though I can think of several reasons why I shouldn't.

However, I DO have a comment: Ashley's new hair color has thrown me for a loop. Newly Brown Olsen IS Ashley, right? It took me twenty minutes to figure that out.   Give us a smile, Brown Olsen.  It can't be that bad.

Oh, Frankie. That's good advice. And I'd like to relax -- really, I would -- but, see, I live in L.A. also, and it's making me tense knowing that a pack of rabid chihuahuas is running around trying to tailor people's pants with their fangs. Mary-Kate-or-Ashley (with the latter's new hair color, who can say without a clear look at the eyebrows?) is putting on a brave face, but I'm not so stoic.

Every so often in a girl's life, she goes out and she stays there too late. We here at GFY like to call that experience "college." And also, "The summer of 2003." But let's focus on the college part.

Harken back to the time you, say, went to a dance or a formal party in a cute dress, stayed out all night, did a few kegstands -- just like God intended -- and crashed out on somebody's couch because you didn't want to drive home, and also, you just sort of accidentally fell asleep on it. Then you woke up the next morning cloaked in the clammy chill of beer sweat, your hair so stringy and greasy from the evening's exertions that you could wring it out and fry a chicken. You had to get home. You had a paper due, maybe, or you just desperately wanted to rinse off in the comfort of your own shower shoes. But, what to do? Put back on the dress you wore last night, screaming to everyone that you're skulking home from an all-night rager? Or try to concoct a semi-plausible alternative -- say, by borrowing a flannel from one of the people who lives where you crashed, keeping the tights and shoes on under it, rolling up your dress and putting it in a shopping bag, and hoping that if you walk with enough assertiveness the whole thing will pass for trendy?

The answer, of course, is both. And neither. Because the thing is, it doesn't really matter what you do -- it's hard to hide a Walk Of Shame. It always emanates from you, to the infinite amusement of everyone who saw you that morning in college staggering back to the dorm with a nonchalant expression on your face, or wobbling through the dining-hall waffle line in boxers and heels.

But what I want to know is, why recreate Walk Of Shame couture as some sort of fashion statement? Why would you want to look like yesterday's Beer Pong tournament?

Unless this actually is a walk of shame, in which case... well played, Mary-Kate. Way to embrace college even if you're not attending it any more. But next time, may I suggest a hat? And perhaps fashioning a skirt out of some dishtowels?

As we've all learned from soap operas, if you've got a set of twins, there is always a good twin, and a bad -- occasionally even evil -- twin. This is just how it works. And the rule applies doubly when it comes to fashion -- there's the twin who generally looks good, and then the twin that usually ends up looking like an ass. Take Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. Jessica Wakefield had the cute striped bikini and flirty skirts and sassy little wedges. Elizabeth Wakefield had pleated pants belted right under her armpits and a pullover with snowflakes all over it and dock shoes. Or Brandon and Brenda Walsh -- which is admittedly a tough call, thanks to the gender difference.  However, despite Brenda's unfortunate tendency toward wearing a man's tie over her bodysuit, Brandon often looked like he was raiding Jim Walsh's closet and his coiffure seemed, at times, to be doing its best impression of a rogue wave, which doesn't work unless you've got Luke Perry's face under there.  So we're giving the Ass Award to Brandon (also because no one rocked the Peach Pit uniform like Brenda As Laverne, and because Brandon was kind of a douchebag). And then, of course, you've got the Olsen twins.  Mary Kate mostly looks like she just rolled out of the back of a dumpster, while Ashley -- we thought -- had mastered the art of looking unusual, but also chic and, you know, clean.

Until now:

Oh, ASH. Where did it all go so terribly wrong? Please tell us this is some kind of Twins Switching Places tomfoolery, or that you and Mary Kate have had your brain switched by Dr Drake Ramoray in order to continue getting complex carbohydrates into M-K's body, or that you've become a Method actress and this outfit is for a role as a crazy, blond old lady. Just don't tell us you think this looks good.

It's nice to see that Mary-Kate Olsen...

a) Still doesn't brush her hair;

b) Still clings to those ribbed tights and staunchly believes that they're viable "bottoms" even though if a stiff wind blew up her overlong tee, her own bottom would be exposed, and not in a cute way, but in an "I see London, I see France, I see the cotton crotch of those uniform tights and that's frankly totally unsexy" kind of way;

c) Still refuses to look anyone in the eye;

d) Has turned to wearing jazz shoes as imagined by the kind folks at Easy "Looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker" Spirit;

e) Still wears strange, inexplicable clothing layers (there is some kind of floaty thing over her tee but under her jacket); and yet...

f) Still seems to be doing better health-wise.

I am such a softie. Well, this second, anyway.

In the hustle and flow of the Oscars, we all momentarily forgot that there was another awards show this past weekend: the Independent Spirit Awards, where the nominees get to "dress down," and, as a result, often look much better than they do when they're all trussed into a formal. Not, however, in the case of our former Derelicte Princess, Mary-Kate Olsen:

The good: her shoes (I'm a sucker for red shoes. When Carson Kressley announced on Queer Eye that only whores wear red shoes, I turned it off and haven't gone back ); her skin; her hair color; her body fat percentage; the sassy interview she gave recently where she gave the impression that she wants nothing to do with the Lindsay/Paris/Kimberly Stewart social scene because she finds that all kind of tiresome, and indeed, you never see her out and about with those girls, which I have to applaud; her chunky awesome ring and the corresponding lack of other crazy piled-on accessories; her continuing relationship with Uncle Jesse.

The bad: that dress. This long, voluminous, bit-part-in-Hidden Tiger, Flying Whatever type outfit works best on tall girls, who won't be overwhelmed by all the fabric (like, Mandy Moore maybe, if she wanted to go a little goth).  And while we all know M-K loooooves to bury her light under a bushel of dollar-a-pound vintage, this is just too much on her tiny little frame -- which, thank God, doesn't look as scary little as it used to. Add to that her too-long hair, and it's all just too much. She looks like she's playing dress-up in clothes that were made for a woman a foot taller than she is.

The ugly: that New York Minute has been surprisingly absent from my late-night cable rotation lately.  And shut up: the ten minutes that M-K and A spend in the House of Bling beauty salon getting made-over -- in a kicky montage, of course -- are pure bliss.

[Photo courtesy of Zap2It.com.]

In one terrifying moment of clarity, Ashley Olsen realized too late that she and her newly person-sized twin had been told a lie: They were not, in fact, so cute that they could make a Hanes XXL look like high fashion. And she had no idea where she'd left her trousers.

One thing The Simpsons has taught us about Australia -- aside from the rules to "knifey-spoony" and some vital lessons about the legal system, which involve a massive boot to the behind -- is that everything there is upside-down, backwards, or clockwise when it should be counter-clockwise (no matter what things like "experts" and "science" tell us, we believe the musings of a room full of eccentric former National Lampoon writers).

Further proof of this phenomenon comes from an Aussie reader, who sent us this link to an article in which The Olsen Twins (No. 4), Kate Hudson (No. 5), Lindsay Lohan (No. 6), Sienna Miller (No. 8) and Kelly Osbourne (No. 9) were all put on a Best-Dressed Celebrities list.

Presumably, the only criteria is that they were, in fact, dressed.

It's like she's having twin withdrawal, missing her other half so much that she's wearing enough clothes for both of them.

Okay, Mary-Kate. We get it. We know you're into swaddling your skeleton in as many large layers as possible to compensate for your lack of body fat. But it's not fooling anyone:

The cowgirl-doily look wouldn't be flattering on anyone, with or without the giant picnic blanket knotted around her neck. But honey, my stick figures that I drew in elementary school had more meat on their bones. Very scary. What happened with you and Ashley? You were so cute together in New York Minute. Um, not that I saw it. But if I had, I probably would have secretly thought you and your sister were sort of sweet -- I mean, I assume, although of course I have no idea what my reaction to that movie would have been. right? Yes.

What about your counselors? What about the rest of your wardrobe? Did it ever occur to you that you wouldn't need seventeen baggy layers and a wad of plaid if you just had some of nature's insulation?

The thing that's most wrong about this picture is that her "boyfriend" is leading her down the street and not toward another rehab center. Please get her some help, Scruffy Boyfriend. Otherwise, it's going to end tragically, either from the disorder or from you having sex with her and accidentally snapping her in half. Then we'll get some kind of badly written television event in which Ashley makes her first solo acting debut playing Mary-Kate, and... well, that's quite a rabbit hole.

So somebody, please give Lohan and Richie and their ilk a good example to follow, and GET THE GIRL SOME HELP so that she stops losing weight in places where there is no weight to lose.

Also: Please make her stop wearing tents.