he year in monsters and regrettable trends
o Time magazine picked you as Person of the Year, but you didn’t really do anything that interesting, did you? You made a cutesy video for your friends? Wow (yawn). That’s awesome. Hey, call us when you get busted for drunk driving and call a cop “Sugar Tits.” Or when, after a career as a child star, you pretend to be destitute and start selling T-shirts to help you get out from under, when all the while you’re completely financially solvent and doing the Dirty Sanchez on home video. Maybe then we’ll consider you POTY material.
While you’re thinking that over and staring into your mylar mirror, we’ve rounded up a year-end collection of scary monsters and regrettable trends that more pointedly capture the year that was. Our monsters weren’t on a par with, say, Pol Pot or Donald Rumsfeld, but they were nonetheless creepy cretins who might not have received the intense media scrutiny their ghastly actions deserved. And our regrettable trends also focus on alarming behavior that, at the end of the day—and the end of the year—will forever be remembered as sooooo 2006.
Note to cyborg Michael Ian Black [don’t open until Christmas 2016, when you do your 10-year look back at 2006]: You’re welcome!
THE SMALLEST LOSER: RACHEL ZOE GAVE US THE SKINNY
After years of proclamations of “The eighties are back!” the anorexia revival of 2006 put the final cherry on top, ate it, and then barfed it right back up. The trendsetter responsible for this bony is beautiful movement was none other than celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe. Reputed to be the David Koresh of the skinny set, Zoe maintains a roster of celebrity clients including Mischa Barton, Lindsay Lohan, Keira Knightley, and (until last month) Nicole Richie under her proverbial 22-inch belt. Under her fashion preaching, Anorexia: Part Deux swept red carpets from coast-to-coast, proclaiming to the world (and impressionable young girls) that too thin was in. Clingy dresses and oversized Bardot-like sunglasses—signature accoutrements of her so-called Zoebots—only exaggerated the skeletal style. For a meager $6,000 a day clients received her expert primping advice and quickly emerged looking so gaunt and malnourished that it’s surprising Madonna didn’t offer to adopt them. Zoe denied allegations that she—a tawny toothpick herself—gave her roster equine asthma medication as a quick-fix dieting solution. In mid-November, just in time for Thanksgiving feasting, an on-the-wagon Richie fired the queen of lean.