The decade-long feud between former What Not to Wear hosts Stacy London and Clinton Kelly is finally over.
The fashion experts reunited Thursday, September 28, on the Today show to reveal how they made amends 10 years after their hit TLC show went off the air.
Kelly — who cohosted nine out of 10 seasons of the long-running makeover series alongside London — explained that he “reached out to Stacy” after seeing constant social media posts about their years-long drama.
“I was like, ‘I can’t take this anymore,’” Kelly, 54, recalled to Today co-hosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie about the stories he would see online. “Because we don’t really hate each other. We love each other, as a matter of fact. We have very strong feelings toward each other. So I reached out to Stacy and I was like, ‘Can we put this behind us? Let’s talk it out.’ And we had a really emotional conversation. It was during the pandemic, sort of as the pandemic was ending. And we just talked through it all.”
It was an emotional segment as the style gurus rehashed their differences and how they made peace.
“I sobbed my eyes out,” London, also 54, recalled. “I let it all hang out. I told Clinton everything that made me sad, everything that hurt me, every way I thought I hurt him. All the petty grudges, all the stupid crap.”
Their rift became public with the release of Kelly’s January 2017 memoir, I Hate Everyone, Except You.
“I either adored her or despised her and never anything in between,” he wrote about London. “We spent nearly 60 hours a week in captivity, rarely more than an arm’s length away from each other. Trust me when I tell you that that is just too much time to spend with any other human being you didn’t choose of your own free will.”
Kelly explained his complicated relationship with London in a January 16, 2017 interview with the Connecticut Post.
“We loved each other and despised each other, and if she were writing a book, I expect she would say exactly what she thought about me too. And it would be fine,” he said.
Nine months later, London blocked Kelly on Twitter. Kelly, in response, claimed that he had “no beef with Stacy” at all in a November 2017 segment of The Chew, inviting her to come on the show and “talk about it.”
On Today, London told the television audience that their reunion is a sign that both of them have matured since the show ended.
“I think part of that is, you know, what I said about evolution. When you grow up a little bit — and we did grow up together on television — there [were] a lot of points of pride that I don’t think either of us were willing to cop to,” she explained.
Now that the former television personalities have made up, they are bringing their fashion expertise live to their fans on a nine-city tour across the U.S. “Now, we’ve decided, we have this great chemistry, we make each other laugh, we finish each other’s sentences, why aren’t we sharing this with the world? So we’re going on tour,” Kelly explained of their The Stacy and Clinton Show tour, which kicks off on Thursday, October 5, in Birmingham, Alabama. “We’re going to stand up and we’re going to talk about the behind-the-scenes stories of What Not to Wear.”
“It’s the in-person content the world needs right now, if we do say ourselves,” the duo wrote on their website.
