Fashion & Beauty

Can Courtney Love clean up her image?

Courtney Love is sick of looking like such a “scary demon” on the Internet.

“There’s, like, 11 pages of gross pictures, and I made those gross pictures,” the 46-year-old singer-songwriter admits a week before her band, Hole, leaves to tour in Japan. “I was so embarrassed to go on Google and see myself look like a crazy person.”

And what better way to fight fashion than with . . . fashion? In a move that’s surprising fashionistas everywhere, Kurt Cobain’s widow is now determined to reinvent herself again, even if it means indulging in the ultimate act of narcissism: a blog dedicated to her every outfit.

As in every single day.

SEE ALL THE PHOTOS

Welcome to WhatCourtneyWoreToday.com, a new Web site for all those people who’ve woken up in the middle of the night with that burning question: What did Hole’s frontwoman wear to lunch today?

“I will say the navel-gazing aspect is probably there,” Love acknowledges of the new site dedicated to showcasing every Galliano nook and Balenciaga cranny of her designer wardrobe, which is insured with a whopping $10-million policy.

The only problem? Oh, yeah. That whole Internet thing.

“Courtney Love has just become sort of a joke,” says

fashionindie.com editor-in-chief Daniel Saynt, noting that the singer lost custody of her and Cobain’s 17-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, last year.

“Here you have someone whose daughter has literally disowned herself from Love and sought the help of the government to keep her away from her, and Courtney’s more concerned about her outfits than getting her daughter back.”

But Love is soldiering on despite the critics. She’s even enlisted three bloggers to chat about her daily looks on the Web site, which launched July 13. Love’s manager, Taylor Mason, 23, is one of the bloggers. Mason says she first created the Web site as a “joke,” then showed it to Love for her approval — and she gave it the green light. Mason is known only as “T” on the site (and was anonymous until now); her two fellow bloggers are unidentified — known as “L” and “X.”

Every day, a new Courtney Love photo appears on the site, which is analyzed by T, L and X and commented on by visitors. In less than a month, WhatCourtneyWoreToday has become a hit: It started with 12,000 unique visitors, and the site now has 20,000 daily viewers — with notables including celebs such as R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe.

“It is kind of vain and stuff,” Love admits. “I’m showing off my wardrobe, I mean, of course it is.”

The bold p.r. move is certainly self-congratulating, say fashion insiders, but it’s also a brilliant way for Love to control her image. “If we’re going to let Britney Spears and Robert Downey have their moments, then Courtney can have her blog,” says Kelly Cutrone, head of fashion powerhouse People’s Revolution. “Is it narcissistic? Yeah. But are we living in a narcissistic world? Yes.”

Rarely critical, a typical post on Courtney’s Web site is a cheerleading love letter like: “The pics are rolling in and they are hot as the summer heat,” or “Love the pose and the new Miu Miu’s!!! Stylish but still rock ’n’ roll to me.”

But in person, Mason says she’s not afraid to tell Love what she actually thinks, describing one outfit as looking like “clown vomit,” another as “Ice Capades,” and perhaps worst of all, “Shirley Temple.”

“She’s a fashion icon in many different ways,” Mason observes. “Not just the baby-doll dress kinder-whore of the ’90s. She’s like a high-fashion Givenchy muse.”

And yet at the same time? “She just seems fried,” says Trent Vanegas, owner of celebrity gossip site pinkisthenewblog.com. “She makes Twitter unusable because if you follow her, she’ll post so much, including, like, scans of contracts with her credit card numbers. It’s just really weird. Honestly, this blog isn’t as interesting because it’s not the craze-fest she normally puts out there.”

He is referring to reports that never seem to go away — of pills and syringes and custody battles. A year ago, Love reportedly trashed her hotel room at The Inn at Irving Place while visiting her daughter, littering the room with dirty needles and used hygiene products.

She’s also skinnier than ever. Even Love acknowledges, “Right now, I’m too thin,” putting herself as a European size 38 (a US size 4), which makes her feel “way too vulnerable.”

Whatever new pictures Love puts out there, it will be hard for her to shake her original image from the ’90s — that of trashed rocker wife with huge red lips and baby-doll dresses. Since then, she’s tried on so many guises, it’s hard to pinpoint the real Courtney Love “look.” She grew kookier as she grew older, and she even entered a glamorous phase in 1996, when she starred in “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” But around 2004, she fell back into drugs and was once photographed letting a stranger suckle her breast at a Wendy’s drive-through.

And now? She owns a Birkin.

Love, who says she was turned down for a physical just last week because the doctor thought she was looking for drugs, says: “Sometimes my wardrobe gets misunderstood. Sometimes because people think I’m still on drugs. Or you know, I’m a little bit nuts — and I am a little bit nuts, that’s for sure. You can’t get any of my friends to disagree that I’m not a little bit nuts, but I’m certainly not nuts nuts — and I’m certainly not on drugs. So I think sometimes [the media] print the worst picture. It’s not really fair.”

So what might Kurt Cobain, who once appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a T-shirt that read “Corporate Magazines Still Suck,” think of WhatCourtneyWoreToday.com?

“He’d probably like it,” Love says, before admitting she doesn’t even know if today the two would still be married. “There’s a quote from him . . . ‘I don’t mind that Courtney goes out and spends money on clothes. I think it’s great’ . . . It was like, ‘Kurt, I go to Urban Outfitters’ . . . I didn’t know what couture was in 1992.”

But today, almost two decades later, Love says she is wearing a “Gianfranco Ferre blouse and Givenchy skirt and Mimi shoes that are amazing” — and she won’t let you forget it.

mstadtmiller@nypost.com