Want to watch Alexa Chung talk transatlantic style, getting fired from a DJ job, and stereotypes within the fashion industry? Us too! Hot Ones, a YouTube show where celebrities answer interview questions while eating increasingly spicy chicken wings, has featured everyone from Gabrielle Union and Liam Payne to Cara Delevingne and Seth Rogen. In the latest episode, Alexa Chung found herself in the hot seat.
In fact, the show's host Sean Evans honored Chung with the title 'Patron Saint of Hot Ones.' "Without Alexa Chung there would be no Hot Ones," he explained, stating that the show's premise was inspired by a Popworld skit the former presenter worked on early in her career. Wearing a cornflower yellow ruched square-neck dress by Molly Goddard ("a casual smock dress from the 1800s" — her words, not ours), she answered "hot questions with even hotter wings."
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While eating the vegan wings, Chung talks about her transatlantic lifestyle since moving to New York in 2009, and how the 'Alexa Chung effect' is just as strong in the United Kingdom as it is in the United States. Answering a series of 'either or' questions on London and New York, she admitted she thought London 'had better style.' "There's room for reverence and quirkiness," she said. "It's expected and celebrated for people to be eccentric, whereas in America there's safety in uniformity. You get fewer looks for dressing like a freak when you're in London."
She also cleared up an awkward press moment that took place in 2011 when she was the red carpet host of the Golden Globes. "I said 'Olivia Wilde, another person who looks really beautiful tonight, there she was in a gorgeous gown, huge skirt, so large in fact, you could probably smuggle three humans under that thing.' I said 'humans,' they heard 'Cubans,'" she explains, noting the team immediately de-mic'd her, turned their backs, and left her to hitch a ride home with a friend.
Having been in the fashion industry since she was 16 years old, Evans also quizzed Chung on aspects of it that don't get talked about as much. "What's one thing that really is as bad as people say?" "Photographers being creepy," she says. "There's always just a little bit of a transaction — it can't not be. Because you're being observed and captured as a purely visual asset, and then they're the ones doing it, so that power dynamic is always going to be weird."
As the sauce got progressively hotter ("my mouth's in a spice prison," she proclaimed), Chung shed light on some of her career's funniest moments, from mistakenly thinking Emma Stone was her best friend to being fired from a DJ gig by Kate Moss. Basically, the entire 24-spice-filled minute show is a can't miss.