Misc. Awards Shows

For someone who seems like kind of a classy girl -- she doesn't talk much about her personal relationships in the press, she seems to wear all the appropriate undergarments, and she can certainly wail -- sometimes Carrie Underwood shows up places looking like she just raided Tabitha's Tack-o-Emporium and Ice-Dance Fire Sale:

I mean, okay, I'm glad she's not showing off her traditional Bustier-With-Train-Over-Jeans look, and, sure,  her legs look fantastic, but Lil' Miss Before He Cheats here also looks like she's about fifteen seconds away from strapping on ye olde figure skates and showing us all how to perform a proper double axel.

Dear Kid Rock:

WE GET IT. We didn't love it when you did it in stained tank tops and a quasi-mullet, we didn't care for it when Keith Urban took on the partial version of this look, and we STILL think it's stupid and vain even though you have cut your hair and borrowed Timberlake's fedora. The brunette, who looks like she's wearing a matching sling on her back for you to slide your hand into when it's cold, is not helping either. We GET that apparently you want us to look upon your life as one long beer commercial, okay? POINT MADE. Now can you please INVEST IN A SHIRT? Seriously. LOOK INTO FABRIC. YOU ARE MAKING ME SHOUTY. LOOK HOW LOUDLY I AM YELLING NOW.

A keg would quiet me down, though, I think. I'm just saying. It's not that I can be bought -- it's that I can be made too blurry and confused to notice that your chest is not a shirt.

On first glance, everything seems normal with Jewel.

I mean... she's Jewel. This is what she does. She has the wavy hair and the cleavage; the hands that are small -- she knows -- but which are not yours, they are her own; and the constant threat that she'll break into a poetry recitation at the slightest provocation.

But... wait, jump back to the cleavage for a second.

Usually, Eve looks pretty age-appropriate, so I can't figure out what possessed her to show up at the Teen Choice Awards -- where, presumably, teens are trying to tell us what they like, because 184 million viewers of High School Musical 2 still felt ambiguous -- in what amounts to cocktail pajamas:

Granted, I covet the shoes a trifle, but overall the effect is less "young vixen" than "Cougar salivating over her prey as she lasciviously licks caviar off a cracker." Or she's simply wearing the uniform of a long-lost martial art in which she's a black-belt -- say, the kind where she can slice off your head with a well-timed leg spin without so much as spilling her bourbon. Rrowr.

Still, I can see one advantage: The only hint of her Anklet of Legal Woes is in the bunching of the evil pants' drawstring hem, so perhaps she thought cloaking herself in fug would distract us from the Lessons Of Her Past. No dice, though, Eve. Also, The Lessons Of Her Past would actually make a great Lifetime movie if you added a few colons in there, like The Lessons Of Her Past: I Drink, Therefore I Can't: The Eve Jihan Jeffers Story.

I might have to eat all those words with a side of paté, however, because here she is demonstrating the more current fashions of the day and I'm not sure it's an improvement:

JESSICA ALBA: I want to die. Why am I here? At least I can wear this shade of yellow. Even in my doldrums, my own beauty comforts me.

DANE COOK: I'M HILARIOUS!

JESSICA: I hate him. And I hate his shirt. It looks like someone threw up on him.  I hate everyone. I hate myself.

DANE:  I SLEPT WITH THAT GIRL! AND THAT GIRL! AND THAT GIRL! I'M A STUD! A COMEDIAN STUD! SEE MY NEW MOVIE WHATSITCALLED WHEN IT OPENS WHENEVER!

JESSICA: Maybe I shouldn't have broken up with my boyfriend in order to pretend that I'm maybe sort of seeing Loudmouth over here, for publicity. But he was boring, anyway. Was that wrong?

DANE: YEAH! AW YEAH! BOO YEAH!

JESSICA:  Sigh. I have to stop this. Thinking gives you wrinkles.

This woman is bravely providing Exhibit A as to why one should never knit one's own clothes while watching Season 1 90210 reruns on SoapNet. It all seems fun at first, but then you find yourself gawking at Brandon's fluffy mullet and screaming indignantly at the galling way Brenda gets upset and climbs onto the moral high-ground when the 25-year old she's been secretly dating dares to be upset that she lied about being of legal age. Then suddenly Andrea is going on about  The Blaze being the top-ranked high-school newspaper in the country (ha!) and Kelly uses the word "dorkmeyer" and Brandon's ex from Minnesota tells him he's a "wonderful lover" and then he becomes a total self-righteous douchebag and you're yelling at the television and rolling your eyes so hard that they quit working and you're catatonic for a few days... and then, you wake up one day and the dress you were slaving over only has half a skirt. And because you've been so immersed in their world and their clothes, you start to see nothing wrong with wearing it anyway, over a pair of cuffed  knee-length jean-shorts, because hey, Kelly wore some over polka-dot leggings and she was still popular.

Don't let this happen to you. Oh, don't get me wrong, you should still watch the re-runs -- I believe today is mother-daughter fashion show at which Brenda learns Kelly's mother is a cokehead. But just don't mix the Walshes with your wardrobe.

Everything seemed to be going so well. The shirt is cute. The pants... might be cute if they didn't make her right leg look like it had sustained a wound from a Star Wars laser blaster.

But the shoes. The SHOES.

Or -- since, with the Dr. Moreau reference, this is apparently Marlon Brando Week here at GFY -- one might gasp, "The horror. The HORROR."

Anything this bad deserves a closer look. I think that's the Second Law of Fuggodynamics.

Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time before Formal Shorts placed a touchy-feely hand onto the knee of The Dreaded Manpri and gave it a loving squeeze.

What's next? We've already seen hints of man-leggings on the catwalk. Will Dress Over Pants be caught copulating greedily with a second pair of pants, giving rise to Pants-Over Pants? Oh, I can't look. It's like The Island of Dr. Moreau over here, except with cotton and no aging, corpulent overlord. And no creepy person-animals.

So really, maybe it's more like the annoying garage chem lab of that girl on Hidden Palms. Either way, I repeat: I am afraid to look... yet cannot look away.

I've looked at this photo of Beyonce for like twenty minutes, and I can't decide if she looks crazy, or AWESOME:

Is it subtle? No. Is it restrained? No. Is it impossible to sit down in? Probably. Could this be one of the costumes from the grand finale of the Xanadu musical? (Warning: that link takes you to possibly the most mesmerizing Flash intro ever) We hope so. And yet, something about how over-the-top it is is also kind of FABULOUS. It's so....shiny. And futuristic. And weird. And ballsy. And probably really hot in the sun -- if you want to hug her, you probably have to wrap a beach towel around her waist to avoid being scalded, like how you sometimes need to use a dishrag to handle your steering wheel during a heat wave.

But this metallic extravaganza is nothing compared to what B wore to perform in:

Much in the way it smiles upon the work of ancient Greek and Roman craftsmen, I think history will look back at Blu Cantrell and revere her as an artisan of fug. Just when you think she can't elevate her game any higher, she straps on a rocket pack and shoots up into the fugtosphere.

Of course, the drawback of the rare place in history she's carved for herself is that our children's grandchildren might look back and think we all wore jeans that made us look like we were either pregnant, or that we bloated ourselves for sport. And I don't particularly want my memory any more tarnished than it already will be by the photos of me in stirrup pants in grade 9.

Still, it takes a special woman to wear something that renders the hideousness of that hat -- and the retina-peeling wrongness of that lipstick -- totally beside the point. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she left the house in a year wearing pants that button at the armpit (assuming her necklaces don't strangle her first), which would a) essentially bind her in a denim bodystocking, thereby contradicting the notion of freedom her shirt purports to advocate; and b) serve as the ultimate "FU" to her body and to the world.