Leslie Jones’ Twitter Makes Her the De Facto Olympics Fashion Critic (Again)

Laura Kumin was watching the Winter Olympics on Sunday night when Italian figurer skater Matteo Rizzo appeared on the ice in a black jumpsuit with gold braiding across his chest. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my God. What about that outfit?'” she said.

As she often does while watching television, she checked Twitter and saw that Leslie Jones, the “Saturday Night Live” star who is live-tweeting the Olympics for NBC, had the same reaction.

“These outfits man what is happening is anyone reading my damn tweets?!” Jones posted.

Jones has emerged as the Olympics’ anti-announcer, funny and often salty, especially when it comes to the fashion, which, at its best, can be daring, and, its worst, well, she has her views.

“He looks like the Nutcracker,” Jones said of Rizzo in her spoken commentary, which often accompanies the phone video clips of the NBC broadcast. “I don’t like it.”

Nothing escapes her sharp eye: not black gloves, not a skating pair in checkers (“I don’t even really know how to express the hate that I have”), not even her and Johnny Weir’s matching hairstyles (“we practically twins”). And she does it all while watching from home on her television and, sometimes, her laptop, too.

“She’s not a fashion expert, and she is not holding herself out to be,” Melissa Rivers, the former host of E’s “Fashion Police,” said of Jones. “She takes all the haughtiness out of it.”

It was Rivers’ mother, Joan, who effectively created a genre of comedians commenting on fashion, with her scathing reviews of Hollywood glitterati. But unlike when the elder Rivers was alive, when the commentary would follow the event, the fashion curious now expect their commentary (and comedy) simultaneously. When Jones wondered aloud why some skating outfits seemed better than others last weekend, her followers chimed in right away, explaining the difference between ice dancing and figure skating.

This, of course, is not Jones’ first time sharing Olympic gold with sports fans. In August 2016, Mike Shoemaker, a former producer for “Saturday Night Live” who works with Seth Meyers, saw her tweets and told Jim Bell, now the president of NBC Olympics Production and Programming. (In one tweet, Jones was dressed as superfan in a red, white and blue costume.) She was hired to go to Rio de Janeiro to work on NBC’s coverage of the Summer Olympics.

For some, Jones’ account is how they watch the Olympics. John Moss, a business technology specialist in Atlanta, said he began following Jones on Twitter six months ago. When he does not have time to watch the Olympics, he checks in with her. “I experience the Olympics through her,” he said.

On Sunday, she tweeted about the fit of a skater’s suspenders. Moss had issues with her fashion take. (“Suspenders rock,” he commented.) “I thought, What is wrong with suspenders?” he said. “I wear suspenders.” He agreed, though, about her assessment of a snowboarder whose pants were bunched around his knees. “That didn’t seem right,” he said.

Jones is headed to Pyeongchang, South Korea, in a few days for NBC. There she will be a contributor, according to the network, and attend Olympic events, meet and interview athletes, and continue to tweet. Her followers wouldn’t want it any other way.