Bonnie - she's just like us
Lights! Camera! Help! Not all famous editors are natural-born fashion divas— but this one sure tries hard
BY LIBBY CALLAWAY NY POST

Everyone will be watching Bonnie Fuller this Fashion Week — but let’s hope for her sake they’re not watching too closely.

While the Us Weekly editor made a splash in the Bryant Park Tents last fall with her flashy, gossipy Us Daily, mastering her own style has proven more of a challenge.

Whether it’s wife-beater T- shirts, too-tiny minidresses or slavish devotion to logos, Fuller has commited more style infractions than the B-celebs skewered every week in her magazine’s “Fashion Police” feature.

She once wore a wool dress to work at Cosmopolitan magazine, oblivious that the washing instructions were visible on the outside.

“There was a tag that read ‘Lavare a mano,’ which means ‘wash by hand’ in Italian,” says a former employee.

“Bonnie must have thought it was the designer’s label because she wore it around like a badge.”

Then Fuller turned up at the office tricked out in head-to-toe insignias — a big-time boo-boo.

“It was a full-on Burberry checked trench coat, a Gucci logo hat and, like, Chanel logoed boots. We couldn’t believe it.”

Stories about her sartorial goofs are water-cooler conversation from Elle Girl to Modern Maturity.

“One time, Bonnie was changing in the office before going to a function,” a Glamour staffer remembers.

“She put on this really tight white column dress and asked a bunch of us how she looked in it.

“Well, it didn’t look good,” admits our spy. “The dress was completely the wrong shape for her and it did nothing to accentuate her neck, which is her best feature.

“But the worst part was that you could totally see through it to her underwear,” she continues.

“No one would say anything. Everyone was standing there, going, ‘Oh, Bonnie! You look great!’ ”

Then a particularly candid staffer walked in the room, looked at his boss and said, ‘Someone please tell her that her underwear is showing!’ ”

Fuller was good-natured about the incident.

“She laughed it off,” the eyewitness says. “But she’s always had a sense of humor about her style.”

That’s probably a good thing. Though she’s been going to fashion shows for more than a decade, Fuller’s never been a style maker, unlike Allure’s Linda Wells, Vanity Fair’s Elizabeth Saltzman or Vogue’s Anna Wintour — Fuller’s idol, according to those close to her.

Fuller launched her daily Fashion Week gossip sheet last fall with a star-struck paean to Wintour, her “oh-so-perfect taste” and “thin, lean, slender frame.”

Former staffers at the Us Daily say Fuller agonized long and hard over every gushy word.

“Bonnie definitely looks up to Anna,” a Glamour writer says. “People say it’s because Bonnie has alway wanted to be a fashionista, but knows she never will be. She’s the underdog.”

While Wintour looks like she was born in an Oscar de la Renta onesie over Chanel diapers, Fuller “dresses liks a very successful working mother,” says writer Jessie Knadler, who worked for Fuller for years.

“She dresses well for her figure and she always wears kick-ass shoes,” Knadler says.

The 46-year-old mom comes off as low-maintenance, but she’s not fooling her magazine staff.

Pre-party primping is de rigeur among top editors, and Fuller can take it to extremes.

Not only do Us Weekly editors have to show their boss pages while her hair is in rollers and her nails are being painted — but those outside the glass-enclosed office can’t help but watch the team of beauty pros go to work on her in full view of anyone who happens to be walking by.

It’s no surprise her rituals are the talk of the office.

“She totally stresses out before public appearances. She calls in a stylist and a makeup artist to work on her — I think it’s in her contract,” says a former Us editor.

“But the big joke around the office is that when they’re done, she looks no different than when they started.”

Some might think it odd that a woman who’s spent most of her career at fashion magazines would have such a hard time sorting out her own closet.

But then, whoever said you had to wear clothes well to write about them?

“Even if she doesn’t express it with her own look,” says a Fuller watcher, “she definitely knows how to sell style.”