Fug Madness 2018, Round 2: A Spice, a Kard, a Pea, and a… Ratajkowski

A reminder: Polls close after roughly 24 hours. Vote on any device, as often as you want to or can. The bracket is here, the Fug Madness FAQ is here, and if you missed the first round, start here with the Cher Bracket and click forward.

Jump to: (4) Kourtney Kardashian vs. (12) Fergie Ferg

(1) EMILY RATAJKOWSKI vs. (9) MEL B

This is one of those battles that is more like a personal reckoning for the voter. YES, IT’S THAT SERIOUS. But I love this kind of thing. Mel B and Emily are very different. Do you expect more or less from the former Spice Girl than from a professed model? Is cheerfully deployed fug less painful to your eye even when it’s also more see-through to it? And if you are sure of your answers to those questions, will you get to the end of this matchup and realize you’ve totally gone in the other direction? Let’s find out.

Mel B is, shall we say, ever so slightly more direct with her fug.

I mean, there is no hiding. It is direct. It says, “My erogenous zones are sponsored by Michael’s craft stores nationwide.”

This one is slightly more mysterious:

By which I mean, I can’t QUITE tell how much of it is sheer, and how much is just pretending to be.

This, however, makes no bones about itself:

I JUST noticed the zipper at the ankle, though. How high up do we think that unzips? At least she DID zip it. I think the only thing that would make this worse would, indeed, be if the bottom half of the leggings was just flapping open.

Speaking of flapping open, this is cut out in the middle like a wacky fashion tent that won’t close. She also wore a skirt entirely made of fringe. And don’t sleep on this:

She looks like the star of her own D.C. comic book, Super Scary.

But I’ll give it to Mel: She’s chipper. Contrast that with when Emily wears fabric.

She is… so sad. She is sad like a tertiary character on a costume drama who has no storyline. She hasn’t done anything to give this outfit any life at all.

Mel is not the only person to wear feathers, either:

Mel’s were in her hair; Emily’s are stuck to the bottom of her…. shall we call this coat “multi-tiered”? That seems like a very polite way of saying, “Why the f&@k is her coat uneven?” She seems to enjoy repurposed jackets. I can’t figure out how this blazer-vest would have worked on its own, so she just stuck a filmy see-through dress under it, and now it’s a whole DIFFERENT flavor of bananas.

Emily also shows a deep commitment to making shirts out of things that are not shirts. For example, once she just full-on wore a bra. And here, she took a jean jacket and made it awful:

It has yet to be proven that this isn’t made of two scarves, rudely married:

And this corset top doesn’t even fit:

I also just noticed the elastic-cuffed pants. Man, she has terrible taste. Remember when she gave herself fake bangs and belted a three-quarter skirt around some lingerie? Or what this Brock Collection dress did to her boobs? That one feels like she was TRYING to be more sensible, and she still just… doesn’t have a sense of what looks good on her.

And if you have gotten this far and thought, “But what is Emily’s answer to Mel’s catsuitery,” the wonder no more:

Yes, Reader, it’s pants. And yes, Reader, IT’S ATROCIOUS.

Archives: Mel B, Emily Ratajkowski

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(4) KOURTNEY KARDASHIAN vs. (12) FERGIE FERG

I don’t like to sway these matchups, because honestly, the fun for me and Jessica is seeing what you guys do. We have the run of this space the rest of the year, in a sense, so Fug Madness is this awesome time where YOU run the show; you’re essentially deciding the content. And every year, stuff surprises me. But I don’t even think it’s exerting influence to note that Fergie may not have quite enough in her arsenal this year to take down Kourtney Kardashian. I dug around to see if we’d missed anything of hers that was worth considering, and did turn up this from an amfAR event:

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It’s actually really lovely in parts, but it seems tight enough around her chest that her boobs almost looks swollen. Would this have looked better if it was all lined with black? I think maybe. But it’s not an EGREGIOUS fug situation. This, however, might be:

It’s just VERY … somewhere in Vegas, a casino is decorated thusly.

But there are a lot of commonalities in their wardrobes. For example, Kourtney would absolutely envy this:

It’s awful, so it’s also obviously Kardashian katnip.

That’s Givenchy, so Kourtney probably also owns it. These two might want to go shopping together. Or, not, because it would feed their worst instincts…

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… because skirt also strikes me as something Kourtney would pick up and call Formal Business Seriousness.

And sheer boots are something the Kards probably pioneered. Maybe Kris can adopt Fergie.

Speaking of sheer shoes, Kourtney actually wore a plastic pair with her own name stitched onto them. And some pants with sheer lacy strips down the leg, which naturally she donned to pick up her child from a class. There was also a straight-up lingerie shirt, and an outfit echoed by her sister Kendall: If they face off against each other, it’ll be The Battle of The Striped Shirt Poking Out The Bottom of Short-Shorts. (Kourtney’s, at least, does not come with fabric manacles on her ankles.) And THIS shirt is… aggressive. As opposed to this one, which is floaty and sheer, and this, which is actually more of a window:

The thing about Kourtney is, she is in FANTASTIC shape right now. This outfit is not great, because the top is letting some underboob slip out, but she looks tremendous in the leather shorts. So it’s doubly head-scratching that she would go out in a dress with potentially someone ELSE’S bod silk-screened onto it:

I mean, it COULD be hers, for all I know. It would be a very Kardashian experience for them to wear clothes printed with their own bodies. But at this point… just wear your own body. It’d actually look better. (And she certainly knows it. I mean, look at this photo. Is she pulling the skirt EVEN FURTHER up? WRONG DIRECTION, KOURT.)

I want to take the arm sheaths — can one call them sleeves? Sheeves, perhaps? — and add that fabric to other parts of the dress.

I genuinely believe she created this herself in her house with a trench coat and a serrated knife.

And then, there’s this, which I forgot existed and which might be the worst thing Kourtney wore all year:

Oh, but there’s more! Lace-up pants! A dress I called simply, “Sleeeeeeeves!” Her archives are a trove.

Archives: Kourtney Kardashian, Fergie

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[Photos: Getty, Backgrid, WENN, InstarImages.com, Rex/Shutterstock]