It's pretty weird when this, this and this:
...are in a position to criticize this:
It's one thing to have a critical discussion of the art of fashion, but Fashion Police is just potshots at people's physical looks half the time. Movie critics don't have to make good movies (or any movies) to be qualified to discuss the art of film. If they did make movies, and they were bad movies, I think those critics would lose their credibility. And yet these ladies are making (frequently bad) fashion choices while thu-rashing others for their (frequently better) fashion choices.
I know it's supposed to be funny, but it's also just painful for me to watch someone in a get-up like Kelly's discuss outfits she finds "ah-mazing" and ones she feels aren't appropriate or don't quite work. She's dressed up as Barney meets Lucille Ball meets Like a Virgin era Madonna! And while that is okay by me, if she gets a free pass to express herself, why shouldn't every chick in Hollywood get the same free pass?
How many fat Adele jokes can we hear? How many Tilda-Swinton-as-alien jokes?
I could not do that job. I can be a bitch, but it would be like me on a panel of judges on a show called Waistlines of the Rich and Fabulous, snittily pointing out which men were grotesquely above a 32.
Meanwhile, Liz Jones, pictured above, writes a catty piece (one in a long line of catty pieces with Madonna as the lynchpin) in the Daily Mail about several famous women going too far with their surgeries. Some are undeniable cases of surgical blunders—we all know that Priscilla Presley damaged her face when it was injected with the wrong kind of substance, so I doubt she needs to be reminded again that she looks bad—but most are women with definite plastic surgery of whom the WORST possible photos have been chosen in order to prove Jones's point.
Using Madonna as an example, the shot used is clearly an off moment. Madonna looks far better in more composed moments. But that would wreck Jones's story. (Sorry, but even if some of the broad-daylight, shot-from-below photos taken at Chime for Change are not good, Madonna looked flawless this past month at the Billboard Awards. Why not toss one of those photos in the mix? Oh.)
I have to say, I don't believe Jones on her best day ever looked a quarter as good as some of the women she is picking on, and that is a fair statement to make since her article is framed as "like me, you're past the point of doing this." She's likening herself to the women in order to paint herself in a better light, that of the women who knows better.
I'm as obsessed as anyone with plastic surgery and I've certainly said unkind things. (With Madonna, I was, as a student of her face over the years—which is in itself open to lampooning I'm aware—disappointed when she went the traditional surgery-and-fillers route and I caught hell for saying so.) But at some point, it just becomes holding people up and knocking them down like pinatas.
