beauty

Kelly Osbourne. How did she become a style icon?

Kelly Osbourne. When we first met her back in 2002, she was 17, fresh out of high school and spent her days being followed around by the TV crew filming the everyday life of the world’s most famous celebrity family – pre Kardashians.

At the time, she was known as a “a wickedly funny, brutally honest, pint-size, potty-mouthed spitfire” (according to Rolling Stone) and sported a style that was more punk than preppy, and more bold that bland. Like her attitude, her hair styles and colours were unpredictable and her never-boring-never-mainstream punk style was a talking point to say the least.

She’s come a long way since then. She’s designed her own labels, and worked as the face of some major fashion labels such as Material Girl (run by Madonna and her daughter Lourdes) and these days, Kelly’s one of four fashion correspondents critiquing celebrity style on the E! Network’s Fashion Police. It seems that in the 10 years since The Osbournes first went to air, Kelly Osbourne has built herself up as something of a fashion icon.

She’s been forced to defend her weight at times, and in an editorial for Glamour Magazine this month she wrote: “I call myself an FFP: former fat person. And when you’re an FFP, you will always see in yourself what people used to bully you for.” “I came from a very, very small village, where everyone called me Kelly Smelly With the Big Belly Whose Dad’s on the Telly. It hurt so badly to be judged like that. Even now I don’t consider myself skinny. But I have put a lot of hard work into my body over the years, and in the process, I’ve really learned to love myself,” she said.

These days 27-year-old Kelly is less punk and more pretty when it comes to style, but she still manages to shock – be whether it’s be dying her hair grey or by groping fellow Fashion Police host Joan Rivers. She’s a regular on red carpets – think Grammys, think Emmys, think Oscars – and she even gets the occasional run on the best dressed lists.

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So what is it about her style that gets everyone talking?

When she dyed her hair grey this year, she had many fashion critiques slightly confused. But responding to their criticism, she said:  ‘It’s something I’ve wanted to do my whole life. ‘I’ve always wanted to be young and have grey hair. To me, I’m 27, I’ve got three years left, the way I look at it, to have fun with it, because once you’re 30, you look like a right idiot walking around with like rainbow, bright color hair and all different things like that.”

In this recent interview with US TV channel MSNBC, Kelly said “Not everyone’s going to like everything that everyone wears. You’ve just got to wear what you like and that’s all that matters. At the end of the day who really cares what I think of what you’re wearing?” Have a look.

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Kelly has said she doesn’t care if people critique her fashion “simply because she’s on the telly.” “I have my own sense of style, love it or hate it,” she said.  “No one’s perfect and if we spend time comparing ourselves to other people, we forget what we do have and how great we are.”