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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
A new fashion buzzword denotes monstrous sartorial sins -- like guys with curly hair who wear mullets. Are we in the golden age of bad looks?
Mar 8, 2005 | The latest addition to the lexicon of the stylish isn't "metrosexual" or "Jewfro" or even "murse" (man purse), all of which are as passi as "bling." It's not exactly a new coinage, but one that has gained a foothold thanks to a certain fuzzy Australian boot. It is not pretty. It is ugly. In fact, it is fugly.
"Fugly" (short for "fucking ugly") may be schoolyard slang, but it's also the buzzword for countless Web sites and blogs, including the high-profile Go Fug Yourself and the inevitable Am I Fugly or Not? Web site. It's even responsible for the name of at least one band. In fact, according to Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, in the last year "fugly" became "common style parlance."
But what exactly does it mean to be fugly? Is there a formula, a certain pattern to be avoided, like the Tommy Hilfiger label? How does one go from being merely unattractive and unappealing to a state of hideousness so severe that it even sounds revolting? Why do celebrities do it so often? And why do we care when they do?
Like a lot of today's worst trends -- spiraling debt, overproduced pop music, Donald Trump -- "fugly" dates to the early to mid-'80s, says Grant Barrett, project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang at Oxford University Press. Earlier citations probably exist (consider that Norman Mailer used "fug" as a replacement for the banned "fuck" as early as 1948's "The Naked and the Dead"), but they fall into the Dark Age known to lexicographers as "pre-Internet."
Likewise, coinage is virtually impossible to determine, but there's no doubt that the "F" in fugly stands for that most favorite of four-letter words. ("If anyone tells you otherwise, they're wrong," promises Barrett.) It's hard to tell whether "fugly" is being used more lately, although there were a flurry of references in 1998, when "Babe: Pig in the City" came out, thanks to the character Fugly Floom, played by Mickey Rooney (draw your own conclusions).
Doonan, for his part, uses it often, to describe everything from Britney Spears ("Queen of the Fuglies") to the robot charms on Prada bags. And for Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, the two reality TV producers behind the Go Fug Yourself site, which hilariously skewers celebrities who have, stylistically speaking, fugged up, it's become a sort of calling card, their mot juste for nearly any occasion. It's a verb, an adjective, a noun -- but is it worse than ugly?
"Being ugly implies a plainness; there's no shock to it, and there's no sense of being taken aback by something's hideousness," wrote Cocks, 27, in an e-mail. "Ugly is straightforward. But when you're fugly, you are fantastically, furiously ugly -- the level of atrociousness is more of a shock -- 'Oh my GOD, what was she THINKING? Oh NO!'" (Picture a barefoot Britney in a public bathroom.) "That, to me, makes fugly a notch or five worse than ugly."
Calling someone out on it, she adds, "is just our way of pointing out to them that they've had a hand in their own sartorial idiocy."
