Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan on Parlaying a Fashion-Snark Blog Into a Book Deal

The madness this March isn’t limited to basketball and brackets — at least not for blogging duo “The Fug Girls.” Over at GoFugYourself.com, self-proclaimed college basketball aficionados Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan have a whole bracket system all their own, pitting stars’ frock frights against each other in what can only be deemed survival of the Fuggest. Before the brackets became their only obsession, we got them talking about how other bloggers committed to a topic (read: obsession) can follow in their footsteps.

The past several weeks have seen the Fugs cover Fall 2008 Fashion Week for New York (where they also contribute a weekly column), turn right around from their home base of Los Angeles to liveblog the Oscars red carpet, again for New York, and celebrate the release of their first book, The Fug Awards, commemorating the worst of celebs’ awards-show attire.

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Known for their no-holds-barred approach to celebrities and the less than appealing outfits they’re frequently found in, the Fugs were actually pretty endearing over salads in Noho and didn’t ostracize our outfit (to our face, at least). After debriefing us on what they considered the tedium of this year’s Oscars fashion, they described how they made the move from part-time to career bloggers, and came clean on topics ranging from what it’s like to work for Tyra Banks and why they’re steering clear of blogging Britney… for now.

After analyzing all this crap celebrity fashion for four or five years now, is it still possible to floor you?
Heather Cocks: Yes, I think so. I think some of the reason it’s still possible to floor us is you write about these people for long enough and, in a weird way, you kind of become fond of them. I think celebrity culture as a whole — the way that everywhere there are so many different outlets to read about these people — that they kind of become characters in a little daily soap opera. Not that I’m trying to dehumanize them, but I feel like it makes you more invested in them. There are people that you hate that become people you love to hate, and there are people that you really root for. And then there are people who’ve turned it around. I love an ugly duckling story.
Jessica Morgan: Right. A comeback.
Heather: So you really get fond of them and that adds a whole extra element — you get excited if someone blows you away or, if someone doesn’t look as good, you’re like, “Aw!” You’re just really crushed. On so many different levels there’s definitely still stuff to make our jaws drop.
Jessica: Thank God.

So how do you explain the fact that the same people continue to make wretched mistakes?
Heather: I don’t know. Maybe they just don’t have good taste.
Jessica: It’s hard to say. I mean, we were talking about this this morning. A lot of people do sort of turn it around. Like Fergie, for example, used to always be out in short shorts and a vest and Pippi Longstocking braids. And now she looks great almost all the time. I think everybody has style flaws, you know, celebrity or not. And I do think people have a tendency eventually to turn it around.
Jessica: Your average Jane, I think, does naturally go through an evolution.
Heather: God knows what it is. I mean, we make fun of how Lindsay Lohan has been wearing nothing but leggings lately. But clearly, there’s something going on with her where she feels like that is the one thing that she’s comfortable in. And everybody goes through that.
Jessica: She can hide cocaine in her leggings.
Heather: Exactly.

You cover Fashion Week for New York magazine, so you’re here a couple of times a year, and you’re based in Los Angeles. You must have run into people you’ve fugged before. Has anyone ever said anything, or is it because your own pictures aren’t so widely circulated that people tend not to know?
Jessica: We’ve never really had an encounter with anyone yet. We live in L.A., but I’m certainly not out going to Hyde. I’m much more likely to be at home or at a divey bar. So we’re really not traveling in those circles. And here at Fashion Week, it’s sort of a different animal. Sure, there are a lot of celebrities in New York and stuff, but�
Heather: We’re not interviewing any of them. I feel like we’re the least of people’s concern during Fashion Week because we’re not trying to take their picture and we’re not trying to interview them; we’re just sort of observing. I mean, there are definitely times I’ll be sort of trying to see who’s in the front row and I’ll accidentally make eye contact with Brittany Murphy or whatever, and I’ll think, “Oh my God, I just wrote yesterday about how she was wiping sweat off her poor husband’s brow during the Max Azria show. If she knew, she’d probably be very upset with me.” But it usually never goes past that. Unfortunately, in L.A., no one’s really come up to us.

What about the fashion media here in New York?
Jessica: Well, they have bigger fish to fry too. All the journalists that I’ve met during Fashion Week have been delightful and really cool. There’s a lot of journalist-camaraderie and I think a lot of those people understand that although blogs are not proper journalism, that we write for New York magazine, and I think there is a writerly camaraderie between people. As far as, like, A Dubs [Vogue EIC Anna Wintour] or a big magazine editor, I really can’t imagine that they’re thinking about anything other than blogs as kind of like a whole entity [rather than GFY specifically].
Heather: Interestingly, we do get some emails from people and someone will be like, “Who the hell are you? I’m a fashion student. Who are you to critique these people?” And I imagine that there are probably some people in fashion journalism who feel the same way. What I would argue is that we’re not really coming at it from a fashion perspective. We’re not trying to sit here and say, “Well, Bai Ling shouldn’t be wearing that sparkly bra because it’s several seasons ago. It’s not ‘now.'” We’re coming at it from the layperson’s point of view, being like, “Oh my God, that’s terrible. I don’t care whose runway that dress is on; it doesn’t work on Cate Blanchett. It’s a little crazy. Maybe she should have left it on a hanger where it belongs.” And when we’re here covering Fashion Week, we’re covering the celebrity angle of Fashion Week.

We’re not trying to act like we know how to analyze trends. We’re not trying to be something we’re not.
Jessica: I don’t really consider us a fashion blog. It’s more of a celebrity blog that talks about fashion.

Conversely, have you ever had celebrities whose handlers or people that represent them are saying “Thank you” for your critiques?
Jessica: We don’t get a ton of feedback from celebrities. I hope that they would have more to do.
Heather: I hope George Clooney has nothing better to do than to Google himself and then email us about it. Sadly, he seems busy, so he has not. Apparently, he’s got movies and stuff to do. He doesn’t have the Internet in his Lake Como villa.
Jessica: I think for most actors, we are just a blip in their giant sea of US Weekly‘s and other blogs [covering them]. They have other stuff going on. Stars we have heard from have actually been, by and large, quite delightful about it. Just because I don’t like your pants, I don’t think you are going to hell. I think people get that it’s in good fun.
Heather: Most of the cranky emails we get are from people who are like pretty low on the list and probably do their own Googling. We got an email from one woman — I don’t even remember her name — she’s a British lower-level celebrity that we put up one time. She emailed us and was like, “You know, I found what you wrote about me six months ago and I thought it was funny then. And now I look back on that day and I was really tired. I was super hungover. My boyfriend was an asshole. And I didn’t want to be there. And I really think you should have taken that into account.” And I’m like, “This is six months after the fact. At the time you thought it was funny, and now that you think about it, you don’t. Also, how are we supposed to know that? I don’t know your life.” There’s a very easy way not to go out when you’re hungover and your boyfriend’s being a jerk. You don’t go on the red carpet where you’re going to be photographed.

Do you ever just burn out?
Heather: Last night, live blogging the Oscars red carpet, I may have.
Jessica: I think anyone who works on one project for a long period of time has a moment where she’s like, “Oh my God, I have nothing more to say.” But outside of being something we really enjoy, it is a good exercise that we have to write every day. Sometimes what we write is good and sometimes the stuff we write is kind of mediocre to ourselves, because you’re your own worst critic. Luckily for us, people are always going to leave the house wearing something crazy. It’s not like I’m a novelist — when you’re doing something like that, it’s hard because you don’t have anything to jump off of. But for us, we’re reacting to something. There’s always new stuff for us to react to.
Heather: People are always evolving; clothes are always evolving. What’s also kind of fun is that in the beginning, everything is fresh and you get all the jokes out of the way that you feel like you’ve been making in private forever. And then the more you’re into it, the more you get context and the more you remember. I imagine it’s like covering actual fashion. It’s like, you see one Marc Jacobs collection and that’s great, but once you’ve seen four, you can kind of start to relate it to other collections you’ve seen and to other collections they themselves have done. You start to think a little bit more about context and history. For example, hating what Cameron Diaz wore to the Oscars and having it so fresh in our head that it reminded us of what she wore the previous year. You can always find different ways to talk about what’s out there, which helps keep it fresh.
Jessica: We hope.
Heather: We hope, yes. Talk to me tomorrow when I’ve quit.

Do you think about quitting?
Heather: No. I love what we do. We have a lot of fun. I get to work with my best friend.
Jessica: Oh, Muffin, me too! I think anybody who works — and I’m sure you can relate to this as a journalist and a writer yourself — there is a moment where you’re like, “I can’t do this anymore!” But essentially, I feel very fulfilled career-wise. My job is great. But occasionally, I’m like, “Oh God! I don’t know what to say about leggings! I’m out, I’m out of ideas on leggings!” It’s not a terrible problem.
Heather: I feel like every job should be like that a little bit, as long as it’s 80-90 percent fulfilling and 10-20 percent banging your head on the table.
Jessica: Kind of like a relationship.
Heather: In that proportion, you still mostly enjoy it, but you still care enough to get upset when it’s not going your way. Whereas if it’s 90 percent annoying and 10 percent good, you just don’t care and you’re out. So as long as there’s still those moments where we’re still getting frustrated with ourselves, it means we’re actually caring about our output.
Jessica: Like a boyfriend.
Heather: Exactly.
Jessica: When you’re not frustrated anymore, you’re probably ready to break up.

Describe a 24-hour cycle of your media consumption.
Jessica: I mostly get up, have my coffee, and get ready for the day. The first thing I really do other than email, which I obviously do first, is I go on Getty and look at all the images from last night — you can search by the last 24 hours. And then I just sort of start picking and choosing stuff. And then we also kind of do that again, depending on what our social schedule is, at night like at 6:00 or 7:00 p.m.. That sets up the next day to get us a little window of time in the morning or when we have a lot of stuff going on. So my days are usually sort of bookended by looking at all our photo sources, like Getty and all our other ones, and picking out stuff to talk about.
Heather: I don’t read an actual newspaper anymore. I tend to read most of my news online. I never thought I would be that person because I used to work for a newspaper and I was like, “There’s just something tangible about a newspaper you can’t ever replace.” And there is, but I just don’t care for any of the newspapers I can get delivered. I mean, that’s nothing against the Los Angeles Times. What I actually find is that I enjoy reading any newspaper for a given period of time, but I don’t enjoy how they tend to stack up and get everywhere. I feel like I am succumbing to the idea that reading on the Internet means I don’t have to wash newsprint off my hands. And I think I like the Washington Post best of any newspaper, so I have to read that online, because I really don’t have a choice.
Jessica: There’s a lot of magazine reading.
Heather: Lots of magazine reading. Oh my God, between us�
Jessica: We do a lot of magazine reading.
Heather: So there’s a lot of stuff piling up. Oh my God, it’s too much sometimes. Especially The New Yorker.
Jessica: I know — I have a backload. I think everybody has a backload of The New Yorker.
Heather: You could make a footrest out of your backlog of The New Yorker.

What about TV?
Heather: There’s a lot of TV. Also, because I’m one of those people that for some reason, I like having background noise and I know it doesn’t fulfill me as much — I’m a visual person as well, so it’s TV rather than music. I’ll watch anything once. For the most part, I’ll then keep watching it, because if I hate it, I want to see how bad it can possibly get, and if it’s great, I get sucked in. And eventually, the stuff I hated I eventually start to love in a really bizarre way. Kind of like with celebrities.
Jessica: I’ve found lately that my TV watching has been swinging like a pendulum between election coverage and then Paradise Hotel 2.So it’s very schizophrenic right now. Now that I have a dual-tier TiVo, my life is complete.
Heather: This is going to sound really nerdy, but it’s almost like studying, because TV does sort of help us to know what people are up to. And God knows it helps us to know what Jennifer Love Hewitt is wearing on Ghost Whisperer.
Jessica: Oh my God. I’m so fulfilled by Ghost Whisperer.
Heather: Because holy sweet cracker sandwich, it’s crazy.
Jessica: That show is so terrible. I love it. It’s so bad.
Heather: I know, I almost love the shows that are so bad they’re good.

How about your system for getting stuff posted to the blog. Do you divvy things up and determine who does what?
Heather: Very scientific. It involves a lot of instant messaging. Basically, I don’t want to say it’s first come first serve, but it is what it is. We’ll both get up in the morning and that’s our first stop, and usually what I’ll say is, “Oh, I think I might fug Ellen Page, if you’re not doing it already.� There are times when I’ll look at a picture and I’ll be like, I would love to write about this, but for some reason I feel like Jessica would do a way better job with this exact picture, so I’ll leave it.

What makes you say that about something?
Heather: I’m a fan of her writing, so sometimes I just want to see what her take is on stuff. And if the take doesn’t immediately leap to me, she’ll come up with something really good. So I’ll pass that over and see if she takes it, and sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t.
Jessica: Heather tends to write about J. Lo. So I let her handle J. Lo. And I used to write about Britney when we wrote about Britney, but now we don’t because it’s not funny anymore, because she’s so sad. So that sort of breaks it up.

Did you lay it out on the blog that you would not be writing about Britney anymore, or is that just a personal decision you made?
Jessica: We didn’t want to say on there, “Listen, we make fun of Britney and we’re not going to do it anymore.”
Heather: Yeah, it’s not really about us. It also makes you look like a schmuck if you just back out.
Jessica: Right. Which of course we’re going to eventually. She’s going to pull it together. And when she’s pulled together enough and she goes out in a barrel, I’m going to be all over it. We just don’t really write about our editorial decisions.
Heather: No one cares what our manifesto is. I also feel like the quickest way to break a rule is to make a rule. So the minute we say out loud and in public, “Oh, we’re never writing about Britney again,” is going to be the day that she pops up perfectly sane and is wearing a bodice made out of chickens.
Jessica: I think a blog is only fun if you’re poking fun at people who have all the rest of their shit mostly together. It’s not fun when– like with Britney — the clothing is so the least of her problems right now. It just felt like piling on.
Heather: Yeah, it’s just so tragic. Her clothes are not really about the clothes; they’re about something deep down that’s broken.
Jessica: That we are not qualified to fix.
Heather: Exactly. So we’re just hoping she fixes what’s inside. And then if she chooses not to fix what’s outside, we’re all over it.

In terms of partnerships, how does that work — In Touch, New York — how did all of that come together?
Jessica: We’ve been very fortunate in that we managed to get some very good partnerships and gigs with people through them coming to us. Our New York editor, Ben Williams, came to us and had the idea of sending us to Fashion Week. And it’s the most fun thing we do. On the whole, people have sort of approached us to do things. We haven’t had to do a lot of outreach.
Heather: Before this I used to do a lot of freelance writing and so I’d been on the other side of the desk. It’s so much easier when people come to you. So I feel very lucky that we’re on the other side right now — for now.

What about the decision to make the blog a full-time gig?
Heather: It felt like it required a huge leap of faith. The way you get paid by ads or whatever, it’s just not closely analogous to what you get paid for a day job, so how can you really figure out, okay, if I quit and we’re making this�How is it going to compare to what your life is like when you have a day job?
Jessica: How long is it going to take before we’re living in a car?
Heather: What actually pushed us over the edge is when we sold the book proposal and we were thinking, “Okay, we’re going to have to write this book now. How are we going to do that if we have a day job and we have to maintain the blog?” And so we said, “Well, this is kind of a gift. The book advance is going to help us do this and we’re going to quit our jobs and write the book. And when we’re done with the book, if we decide it’s not sustainable then we’ll just go back to working day jobs.” And luckily, that was the kick in the pants we needed, to make us realize that we could get by just with ad sales and the book advance. We’ve been okay. It took that moment of being like, “Now we’re being paid to write something. We actually need to write it. We need time to write it. We need to not be too stressed out when we’re writing it,” to kind of get us to do it. So summer of 2006, we quit our day jobs.
Jessica: The six months before that, we were both in a period where we were really busy with our day jobs and we had to turn down a lot of stuff that we otherwise would have accepted because we couldn’t fit it in with work. And we were kind of like, We have to make the decision that we’re going to work on our project instead of having to make it second fiddle to other projects.”

What were you passing up?
Jessica: It wasn’t anything huge-gigantic. No one was sending us to Paris or anything like that. Media appearances.
Heather: Like Style [Network] or VH1. Any of those talking heads shows, they would say, “Oh, we need someone to talk about fashion. Can you do it?” And we wanted to do it but we’d have to say, “We can only do it on weekends or after 8:00 at night,” because we can’t leave our jobs during the day. It just became a scheduling problem. It�s funny, because when we first got offered Fashion Week, we were still working [day jobs], but we took it. We were like, “We’re doing this.” We both had a good enough relationship with our bosses in our respective companies that they were going to help us find a way to make this work. So we took it and, before we actually had to negotiate, we had both quit. But that was the one opportunity that we were like, “To go to Fashion Week, to see how that works, to see the clothes, to see our first fashion shows, we can’t turn that down. That we will make work.

What were the day jobs that each of you had?
Jessica: We were both working in reality television as story producers, essentially. My show actually ended and I didn’t have to quit. My contract just ended. I was working on, at the time, a show for the Travel Channel starring Marisa Tomei as she shopped around the world. And it was kind of not going great and I believe Travel Channel ended up showing all three episodes in the middle of the night on Christmas or something like that, when no one saw it. But I worked on a bunch of stuff: I worked on Growing Up Gotti, which was actually really fun. And then the one that I trot out at cocktail parties because it makes me sound intellectual is 30 Days, which is the Morgan Spurlock show. I did the pilot of it — or the premiere of it.

Heather: Whereas, I’m a bride of Tyra Banks. I got sucked into America’s Next Top Model and I did five seasons of that show. That�s the one I trot out at cocktail parties.

What was it like to work with Tyra Banks?
Heather: She’s really good at her job. People always disbelieve that she’s as involved in the show as she purports to be in the media, but she is. She never lets an episode go by without giving notes on it, often multiple passes. She has very strong feelings about — she’s fought for stuff to be in episodes that ended up really being strong. Actually, she’s come up with some really good producer/editing touches that have totally worked. Just little things where I was like, “God, that’s such a small thing but that actually really is funny.” I really enjoyed it.

How about Morgan Spurlock?
Jessica: I didn’t work with him that much. He is in the field so much. He’s one of those guys who meets you once and then remembers you the next time he meets you. He’s very charismatic, which I’m sure is one of the reasons he’s so successful, because if you remember everybody’s name, that’s a big deal.

What advice would you offer other bloggers interested in taking it in a full-time direction?
Jessica: We never planned for this to be our full-time job; it was always some nerdy way to amuse ourselves. I think we really stumbled into a lot of good fortune, which I think happens to a lot of people that end up doing something that’s creative. Not that we don’t work hard, but we never had a grand business plan or anything like that.
Heather: If you’re paying a mortgage on a mansion in Beverly Hills and all you want to do is blog, I don’t know if that’s going to work out for you. It just depends where you are and it depends what you’re doing. What worked out nicely for us is that we didn’t really start the blog to say, “Let’s do something different.” It was something that we just enjoyed joking about amongst ourselves, because we were friends first. And then we started the blog — we both like to write — and the blog is very much an expression of us. It’s sort of what it’s like to hang out with us and talk about clothes, except maybe with more syllables. So in that respect, we’re not trying to be something that we’re not in order to get hits and to get ads and to get money. That’s [part of] what’s made the blog more widely read, I think. I would just say that if someone wants to try to blog and make that their life, to make sure they’re writing about something they care about, and make sure they’re not trying to write about it in a way that isn’t true to their self-expression. You’re always going to sound more authentic when you’re writing in your own voice and in your own style, and that’s really what makes you different from any other blogger out there.
Jessica: We’re really careful about how we want to monetize it, because I think it’s really easy to make your blog sort of overly ad-ified. I get that you need ad money. I need ad money. But you try to put the creative aspect of it first.

How did the idea of writing a book come about?
Heather: We had a lot of emails from people who were like, “I work in publishing. You should totally write a book.” And we were like, “Yeah, yeah. Thanks.” Then our [future] agent, Scott Hoffman of Folio Lit, was smart enough to say, “I work in publishing and you should write a book and I’m going to be in L.A. and I’d love to buy you a drink.” And we were like, “Done, and done.” So we met up with him�
Jessica: He spoke our language, the language of the alcoholic beverage.
Heather: We hit it off, and he was like, “I really think you should do this.”
Jessica: We just didn’t know how to do it. I would always [say], “I like to write,” but how do you get from “I like to write” to actually having a book that was completely [mapped out]?
Heather: [Hoffman] really felt that we should try to do something with the blog. Jessica and I want to write other things together someday, maybe fiction. But for now, it seemed like this was a great entry into publishing: See if we could turn the blog into something that would be a fun coffee table book. It was so nice to enter into that world with something comfortable. I’ve never written much fiction before; when we do that it’s going to be really nerve-wracking for me, but at least we have a really good relationship with our agent. We kind of get a little better about knowing how [book publishing] works and we know the questions to ask.

Our learning curve was based entirely on this blog that we know by heart, so when it actually came down to writing the book, it was really just about sitting down and letting it all go. The key was just finding a way to make it � timeless. I’m not going to say anyone’s going to be digging that up from the time capsule in a thousand years. But I think if you read through it, it feels more like a snapshot in time rather than being like, “Look what Chloe Sevigny is wearing lately.” We found a way around that.
Jessica: There’s such a large lead time on the book, especially with ours, because there were a lot of graphic elements involved. The main challenge of the book was to not make it feel super dated. And I do think people will read it and be like, “Oh yeah, I remember when she wore that.” Hopefully that’s the reaction.
Heather: I sort of feel like if it sells two copies, that’s fine. As long as the people who read the blog every day have been happy with what they invested in it, if they bought the book then those are the people that have gotten us to the point where we even write a book or anyone would even care what we had to say. It’s tough, too, because someone like Perez Hilton wants to write a book, he could probably write a book about what it’s like to be Perez Hilton and how he got to be Perez Hilton and where he’s going next, and people would be like, “That is the shit I want to read.”
Jessica: Mine would be like, “I’m watching reruns of 90210 in my yoga pants.”

In terms of selling the proposal, how did that go? Did you have multiple publishers interested?
Heather: We did. We even had people who emailed us, one of whom was eventually the guy who first became our editor. We kind noodled around with what to do. Do we do a history of Fug; do we do style tips for what not to do — is it that kind of thing?
Jessica: How not to fug yourself out?
Heather: Do we write it as a facetious guide to looking like a celebrity, but make it all these tips about how to fug yourself up? What’s the tone? We finally figured out that the award show thing would make the most sense because it’s basically like a ‘best of the worst, worst of the worst’ kind of thing and who doesn’t love that stuff? We basically put [the proposal] up for auction, I think. It came down to two publishing houses — also there were two different people and two different bids at Simon & Schuster. So once we went with the Simon & Schuster bid, we had to figure out which editor we wanted it to be.

How did you make that decision?
Jessica: It was so hard.
Heather: It was like phone interviews. It was like a blind date.
Jessica: We would chat with each other to sort of get a sense of what they were, and the problem was they were both great guys. I think we would have been happy with either one of them, which I think made the decision for us more difficult. If one of them had been great and the other had been a yokel, it would be easy.

Talk a little bit about live blogging. Do you love it? Do you hate it?
Heather: We’ve actually only live blogged twice. We did the Oscars last year — the Oscars ceremony — and this year the red carpet. [New York] just launched a daily fashion blog, “The Cut,” and so live blogging the red carpet seemed like more of a natural fit with that blog. We figured we could do it without treading on our own site too much. You never want to step on your own toes.
Jessica: It seemed like a natural fit for what our column is in New York magazine right now, anyway. I think people have more strong opinions about the red carpet than they do about the actual [Oscar] ceremony, except in the case that there’s a crazy upset.
Heather: Live blogging is fun, though. It’s a little stressful sometimes because of all the things that can go wrong, like, for example, not having E! in your hotel room. It’s not done as a conversation between the two of us, but it’s sort of done in a more conversational manner that’s more indicative of what it’s like to be in a room with us, as opposed to the really long stuff that we write for [the blog] itself. So it’s kind of fun to get that change every once in a while. I don’t know if we’d be live blogging everything if we had the choice, but it’s fun every once in a while. It’s just the right amount that we don’t get sick of it.
Jessica: Also, as a writer, sometimes it is refreshing to write something that has a hard ending, like “We’re done now.” You’re live blogging, it’s over. No ending, that’s it.
Heather: When we did the Oscars last year, we had TiVo. So we would blog and then we ended up half an hour behind, in a way, because we would get so into making sure we covered everything. And we were like, “How are we going to do that with TiVo?” And then we realized you just do it. If you miss something, it’s fine. It gives you parameters.

Rebecca L. Fox is mediabistro.com’s managing editor.