How Celebrity Style Maven Steven Cojocaru Battled Too Gay Label, Lost It All and Lived t

It’s hard to remember a time when fashion and beauty commentary were not ubiquitous. When red carpet pre-shows for the Oscars or the Met Gala were not the norm, or before anyone with a TikTok or Instagram account could be an obsessive pundit on celebrity style.

Steven Cojocaru was there, however, at the beginning of this sartorial saturation. The Canadian writer and TV host, now 50, hustled tirelessly in his early career to get legacy media to take style as seriously as he did. He became People magazine’s first West Coast fashion editor in 1997 and was the first out gay fashion correspondent for NBC’s “Today” during the highly watched Matt Lauer and Katie Couric era.

His persona was so vivid that Jimmy Fallon parodied him on “SNL” in 2001. His exacting analysis of winners and losers in the high-stakes game of celebrity dressing was equally loud and memorable. But decades ago, pop culture was not so kind to LGBTQ people in media. As stories about fame often go, Cojocaru’s came at a high personal price.

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Tall, brash and flamboyant, with a shock of spiky blond hair, Cojocaru says his passion springs from a single place: “Fantasy. I grew up watching Bond girls, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich. I’m not interested in Khloé Kardashian wearing denim jeggings to go to Popeyes in Calabasas. I am interested in glamour and goddesses and fantasy.” His commitment to those ideals — and spicy on-camera interviews with megastars like Sarah Jessica Parker and Britney Spears — propelled him into his own kind of celebrity.

While serving as executive producer of “Today” during its golden years, Jeff Zucker sought Cojocaru out personally in 2000, the host recalls, after reading his People column Behind the Seams. What started as a People-branded segment on the show each week turned into a regular gig that sent Cojocaru to the runways of Paris and Milan, where he’d report trends and gossip to Lauer and Couric in New York.

“Our roles were instantaneous. They the horrified ultra-conservative parents and I was their scary gay son. And they played it to the hilt,” says Cojocaru. He credits one particular line with catapulting him into the zeitgeist. During his first Paris Fashion Week for “Today,” Cojocaru told the anchors that the emerging theme was a new kind of femininity. Lauer asked if he’d seen anything feminine backstage.

“Yes,” Cojocaru told him on air. “The hairdressers.”

And so this family dynamic, which every morning news show has strived to recreate in American living rooms since the birth of television, put an outsize spotlight on Cojocaru.

“I created this character, like I was Mick Jagger in a top hat. The ringleader of this fabulous circus,” he tells Variety. “I drag people for their clothing, but it’s just clothing. I know the line,” he says, clad in a leather trench and gold cuffs à la Wonder Woman. “But I woke up one morning in 2003, and there’s a headline on a blog, ‘Cojo: A Case for Gay Bashing.’ That’s when it started connecting to violence.” Other publications, like Details and The Washington Post, followed suit with blunt and hurtful pieces about whether he was “too gay” for television. For Cojocaru, such assessments were sadly familiar.

“I’ve always taken what’s uncomfortable and found humor in it. That’s been my weapon,” he says. The son of a dressmaker, young Cojocaru was the victim of intense bullying on the Montreal playgrounds where overdeveloped jocks would slam him as girlish (his hand, clutching a frosty Diet Coke, still shakes when recalling a confrontation where three of his biggest attackers said they’d dug a grave for him in a nearby backyard. Cojorcaru would fear parks and open fields for decades after).

But nestled in the safety of rising stardom and the glittery lights of Manhattan, none of that could touch him. He parlayed his “Today” show fame into a nine-year gig on “Entertainment Tonight.” That, coupled with side jobs on shows like “American Idol,” meant his lifestyle could catch up to his success. He secured a vintage Mercedes and multiple homes in Beverly Hills. A curveball came when Cojocaru was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease in 2004 and required two transplants. Benched from his beloved carpet and scared for his life, he began spending money like he was dying. He also had to navigate choppy political waters at work: He gave Oprah Winfrey an exclusive interview about his illness; the regime at “Today” balked, and he was dismissed soon after.

Cojocaru turned to alcohol to cope, and in a few short years lost everything. Used to boasting about neighbors like Cameron Diaz and Sandra Bullock, he’d wound up on an air mattress in a studio apartment. He sustained this Spartan lifestyle by slowly selling off his incredible clothing and furniture archive so he could live bottle to bottle. A lifeline came from friends who offered their vacation home in Rancho Mirage, “where I could dry out. At that point, I was drinking day and night. It was the darkest of the dark.”

Rock bottom came one sweltering afternoon in 2016 when he needed “booze and cigarettes.” He suited up in python boots, Dior jeans and his trademark hair extensions for a walk to a gas station (located miles away, across a golf course in the middle of the desert). Ten feet into the journey he began to lose consciousness. The adhesive from the extensions melted and rolled down into his eyes, blinding him like acid.

“I found a sliver of shade under a palm tree, and then truly saw the ridiculousness of this,” he recalls.

Awaiting him was no celebrity rehab or private jet to a clinic in Switzerland. He returned to L.A. on his own steam and committed to an AA program. Now a triumphant five years sober, Cojocaru says that “in the rooms [of AA], I’ve dealt with the fear and the shame. And something so unexpected — a younger generation who remembers me as formative in their childhoods. They loved me back to myself and inspired me to be a mentor.”

With newfound self-acceptance and verve, Cojocaru is ready to get back to work. He’s active on Instagram, posting pics of celebrity street style and carpet glam, imparting his critiques in the captions. He’s developing a video series and a podcast, all of it with one goal: “To create community. I have this vision of creating a kooky madcap world, a center for advanced studies in fluff, froth and fun. The only rule? We have to laugh at our bad hair days.”

Cojocaru’s hair by Ramòn. Makeup by Jeannie Giannone.

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Larita Shotwell

Update: 2024-09-20

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