Georgie wears a sweater, rings and hot pants from Screaming Mimi's.A few days before one of the biggest auditions of her career, Georgie Okell dramatically changed her look. "I was going through a phase last summer where I decided to buzz my head," explains the 27-year-old. "I looked a bit like G.I. Jane. Hardcore." That ballsy move must have impressed the execs at Fuse because they hired her to replace fellow UK native Alexa Chung as a host of the network's nightly music talk show Fuse News. "I guess they liked me," she says with a gap-toothed smile.
When Okell took her place at the news desk earlier this year, she was already a big deal across the pond, known as the bubbly badass host of Channel 4's pop culture program T4 -- a gig that Chung also held before moving to New York. "I've sort of been following her around and taking all of her jobs," quips Okell, who moved to Williamsburg last spring. "Obviously we're different -- she's super high-fashion, she's great... she is Alexa Chung! But we also have that same sort of sarcastic, self-deprecating British thing."
The don't-give-a-fuck-try-anything attitude that Okell applies to her hairstyle is the same one she has when interviewing celebrities and up-and-coming musicians. On T4 she arm-wrestled Kristen Stewart ("I adore her. I think we're gonna get married.") and initiated a striptease segment with Channing Tatum. "I want to get a reaction from everything I do," says Okell, who also hosts the East Village Radio show Pop Goes the Future. "You only have those 10, 15 minutes to do something interesting. So even if people are like, 'This interview is terrible, this person doesn't even like you,' it's like, 'Well, you reacted, because I didn't just sit there asking when their album comes out.'"
Fuse News airs weeknights at 7:30 p.m. on Fuse.
Stylist: Sanna Fried / Hair and Makeup: Ronnie Peterson for Makeup Forever at Artists at Wilhelmina.