Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers

Agins, Teri

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9781622315352: Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers

ISBN 10: 1622315359 ISBN 13: 9781622315352

Publisher: HighBridge Audio, 2014

Hollywood stars have always furthered fashion's cause of seducing the masses into buying designers' clothes by acting as living billboards. Now, red carpet celebrities are no longer content to just advertise and are putting their names on labels that reflect the image they-or their stylists-created.Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Lopez, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sean Combs, and a host of pop, sports, and reality-show stars of the moment are leveraging the power of their celebrity to become the face of their own fashion brands. And a few celebrities-like the Olsen Twins and Victoria Beckham-have gone all the way and reinvented themselves as bona fide designers. Teri Agins charts this strange new terrain with wit and insight and an insider's access to the fascinating struggles of the bold-type names and their jealousies, insecurities, and triumphs.

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About the Author:

Xe Sands is an award-winning narrator known for her authentic characterizations and intimate delivery. She has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance, and visual art, and she has been recognized for her engaging romance narrations.

Billion-Dollar Babe: Jessica Simpson and the New Age of Celebrity

On a March 2012 episode of Fashion Star, the Tuesday-night NBC reality-show competition featuring unknown designers, celebrity judge Jessica Simpson asked a contestant named Nicholas why his designs had so many zippers. A smug Nicholas told Simpson that if she only understood fashion-forward menswear trends, she would get it, adding, “It’s very hard to understand the girls giving advice about men’s fashion.”

But Simpson, whose fast-growing namesake fashion label was becoming the millennial generation’s answer to Liz Claiborne, wasn’t having it. She snapped back: “I’m a little bit offended. Not a little bit, a lot of bit. To talk down to a woman in this business? We’re running the world right now, okay? I’m trying to help.” She added, chuckling, “I really kind of want to hit you across the face right now.”

Her smackdown drew cheers from the TV audience as Simpson, the face behind her billion-dollar fashion brand, kept smiling.

Who could ever have imagined fifteen years earlier that this former teen backup singer from the outskirts of Dallas would have grown up to become a mainstream force in American fashion, with a footprint in European countries like Greece and Spain as well?

The Virgin Bride

Simpson’s odyssey as a tastemaker had begun in 1997, when the newly signed Sony Music artist met Rachel Zoe, perhaps the most important of the many newcomers who soon would begin entering Simpson’s dramatically changing life. Zoe was one of a new breed of Hollywood image makers known as stylists, who were essentially well-paid fashion fixers, using good taste and designer connections to give their clients arresting, individual looks. In order to have a shot at pop stardom, Simpson would need such a makeover. So Tommy Mottola, the CEO of Sony Music, introduced Zoe and Jessica. “She was seventeen,” Zoe remembered to me in 2012. “She came to me with peroxide long hair and long nails. She couldn’t have been more adorable. She didn’t take herself too seriously.”

Simpson was coming of age as a child of MTV and VH1 videos in the fast-paced era when entertainers started to worry about their on-camera close-ups as much as their singing voices and acting talents. They were particularly attentive to style and to fashion detailing. They had little choice. In the final years of the twentieth century, a convergence of media, social, and marketing trends were evolving a celebrity-centric culture, producing a perpetual parade of famous and infamous characters—bona fide and contrived—that fed a willing public’s burgeoning fixation on living vicariously.

The ubiquitous images of celebrities invaded our homes. They entered our personal spaces on the covers of every magazine and on all our screens: computer, cell phone, and wall-to-wall reality TV. The sheer volume of the exposure was punctuated by the Instagram immediacy of social media, which boosted celebrity scrutiny exponentially. An orgy of year-round celebrity self-celebration ensued. The Oscars, Grammys, Golden Globes, Emmys, Video Music Awards, Cannes and Sundance film festivals, and assorted red-carpet events fueled celebrity worship for an insatiable global audience. Paparazzi armed with 200-mm lenses stalked in the bushes, recording the most unguarded private moments of celebrity prey, spilling every indiscretion—whether they were closet smokers, who they dated, and how good or bad they looked at a gallery opening, coming from the gym, or on vacation at the beach.

Increasingly, the focus was on what celebrities wore. Of all the things we worshipped in our favorite celebrities—beauty, charm, wit, talent—by far the easiest thing to emulate was their clothes. No matter how much we wanted to “be like Mike,” we weren’t going to acquire a forty-eight-inch vertical leap. But we damn well could buy a pair of Air Jordan sneakers.

Jessica Simpson managed to insert herself at the forefront of such celebrity tastemaking right as the great wave was forming. Simpson was pretty to begin with. The nubile Texan had great legs, gleaming, TV-ready teeth, and big boobs. (“Natural double Ds,” Joe Simpson, Jessica’s father and manager and a former Baptist minister, shamelessly bragged to everybody.) That was enough to get her noticed. When her fledgling singing career flagged just as reality TV was taking off, MTV executives bought into Joe Simpson’s initial proposal, that Jessica, twenty-three—just married to Nick Lachey, twenty-nine, a member of boy band 98 Degrees—could do a reality show modeled after The Osbournes, the MTV reality hit featuring the family of heavy metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne.

In 2003, Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica debuted on MTV, following the pop-singing couple at the start of their married life. The hook of the show was the positioning of Jessica as a virgin bride, playing the innocence of the preacher’s daughter.

The first show took place inside the couple’s new Los Angeles home, six months after their wedding. They were eating in front of the TV when Jessica posed a simple question that would forever typecast her as the proverbial dumb blonde.

Jessica stabbed her fork into a chunk in her salad bowl and asked, “Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna, but it says ‘Chicken by the Sea.’ Ha-huh, is that stupid?”

An incredulous Nick explained, “Chicken of the Sea is the brand. You know, a lot of people eat tuna the way they like to eat chicken.”

Jessica mumbled sheepishly, “Ohhhh. I understand now. I read it wrong.”

TV watchers snickered at her ignorance—was she for real? Yet the plainspoken Jessica was getting over—as an unpretentious, likeable, and very hot-looking babe. Newlyweds thus evolved into one of those quirky hits—so watchable because, apart from how attractive they looked, Nick and Jessica were refreshingly regular. The mindless thirty-minute show went down easy; it was like peering through a keyhole into a Middle America fairy tale.

When they were The Newlyweds: Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson circa 2005.

Newlyweds ran for forty episodes through 2005, building a cult MTV following, as young viewers tuned in to catch Jessica’s latest antics—and watch her be scolded and swept into the arms of her romantic husband, like a blonde Lucy Ricardo. As the eye candy and comic relief of the show, Jessica soon had millions of eyeballs locked on her every move and every curve.

But unschooled beauty wouldn’t be enough to hold up under that kind of scrutiny. This gospel-singing, churchgoing young woman lacked a cosmopolitan edge.

That’s why years before she was on TV, Jessica needed Zoe, and she needed fashion with a capital F. But no one could have guessed back then that over the next decade, fashion would need Jessica Simpson.

Rachel Zoe’s simple transformation of Jessica from bumpkin to fashion icon mutated into a new reality, where the clotheshorse became the rider, a fashion authority every bit as respected as the stylist.

“I worked hard with Jessica,” recalled Zoe. “She is the all-American girl. She was open to playing with her image. We fought hard to keep her fresh and pretty and modern and fashionable. She had a very classy image, a very beautiful image, and the fans worshipped her.”

In the music world the standard formula was sexy—skintight, short minidresses. But Jessica didn’t want that image. So Zoe took another approach. “We did a lot of peasant dresses, white eyelet tops, and really great denim shorts, and great jeans,” says Zoe. “She looked so beautiful in a simple white top and jeans. She is the most beautiful in her natural state.”

Rail-thin, with long, center-parted, wavy blonde hair, Zoe, born in 1971, had begun her career in the early 1990s after graduating from George Washington University, as a fashion assistant and editor at teen fashion bible YM magazine, where she styled models and celebrities like the Backstreet Boys for photo spreads. Zoe’s own eclectic wardrobe—a m�lange of furry vests, vintage trinkets, and the long, hippie day dresses—gave her a signature ’70s vibe. She rolled around town with New York swagger—so self-possessed in her huge sunglasses, gesturing with an armload of bangle bracelets. Her clients included people like Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton, and Keira Knightley.

Hollywood stylist Rachel Zoe helped Jessica Simpson develop her signature style.

Zoe would become a fixture in Jessica’s retinue. Indeed, professional fashion fixers like Zoe, Phillip Bloch, and Jessica Paster had suddenly found themselves in the vanguard of Hollywood’s hottest profession—stylists—a career that hadn’t even existed before the 1990s. They were among the most enterprising former magazine editors and design assistants who worked their connections to corral exquisite designer gowns and diamond baubles on loan—as well as procure the trendiest jeans, leather jackets, and all the fashion trimmings of everyday living. Initially they toiled behind the scenes; the savviest stylists usually didn’t “dress and tell.” Their discretion permitted stars to claim credit for having such great taste, for looking so “hip, cool, and pulled together,” as stylist Wayne Scot Lukas told me in 1998. For working their fashion magic on celebrities, the stylists back then began earning around $1,500 to—when movie studios footed the bill—$6,000 a day and up.

Meanwhile, as Newlyweds wound to a close in 2005, Jessica now had something more valuable than a good voice: a hot image to take to the big screen in a hurry. But the “dumb blonde” persona meant that she made her Hollywood debut in a C movie—The Dukes of Hazzard—as Daisy Duke, with some forgettable cameos dressed in butt-flashing short-shorts and a bikini. “She and her attire make equally brief appearances,” the Hollywood Reporter smirked.

Yet a funny thing had happened during Simpson’s Newlyweds run. All those intrepid photographers who made their living shooting famous people and their fashions hadn’t been able to get enough of Jessica Simpson. And millions of fans gobbled her up.

When they saw her looking adorable in a midriff top or Daisy Duke cutoffs and boots, they didn’t think of the stylist who might have put together that outfit or the designer who created it. To them, the look was pure Jessica Simpson.

This wasn’t lost on Los Angeles fashion company CEO Gerard Guez of Tarrant Apparel Group. Guez was one of the owners of the 1970s designer jeans sensation Sasson Jeans (launched by his older brother Paul) with their “Oo la la” TV commercial slogan. Guez keenly sensed that the winds of fashion were blowing in a new direction: away from the runways in New York and Paris and Milan and straight toward Hollywood. He wasted no time, racing ahead of other apparel makers to sign Jessica Simpson to launch a new jeans collection, starting at $49, aimed at her fans.

Jessica was no fashion designer, but she didn’t have to be. She wouldn’t have to create the look or do the heavy lifting. In her licensing contract with Tarrant, she was basically responsible for being the public face of her namesake brand, for a minimum guaranteed royalty payment of $4 million in the first year, Guez told me.

While Guez was pivotal as Jessica’s launchpad into fashion, she would soon leave Tarrant behind as she soared to unexpected heights.

By 2012, her cursive Jessica Simpson signature would become a coveted label at stores like Macy’s, for the trendiest platform shoes and handbags, sporty dresses, off-the-shoulder tops, and denim cutoffs—twenty-two product categories and counting that pulled in $1 billion in retail revenue a year, according to the Camuto Group. Her estimated annual cut of the booty: probably more than $20 million. Not bad, reflecting how her brand had mushroomed into a well-oiled fashion machine like any other on Seventh Avenue, using design teams and marketing experts enlisted to interpret Jessica’s trendy look.

Jessica’s inventive take on the lace-trimmed tops, zip-front jumpsuits, bustier maxi-dresses, and her famous wardrobe of high-heeled boots, were the building blocks of the look that Rachel Zoe helped her hone over the years. When teen shoppers headed to the mall, they asked for “you know, those Jessica Simpson–style boots.” As for the booty, well that was Jessica’s. In 2005, in a People magazine survey of 80,000 readers, Jessica Simpson’s shapely rear outpolled the most famous butts in the business: Jennifer Lopez’s and Beyonc�’s. She could WEAR those tight jeans—and her fans lusted for them too.

Riding the Wave of Blurred Lines

“Brands matter more than ever—the consumer perceives greater value, higher quality, and greater status—but the definition of brands has broadened immensely,” said Richard Jaffe, an analyst who follows retail stocks for Stifel, Nicolaus & Company. He told me in 2012, “A brand can be a fashion designer who has been making high-quality merchandise for a long time, or it can also be Alex Rodriguez or Donald Trump.” A celebrity’s name on a label effectively fast-tracks a new fashion brand—shaving off as much as ten years to develop widespread recognition.

It’s not just Jessica Simpson. Brands like The Row by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Victoria Beckham, Tory Burch, Donald Trump, Air Jordan by Michael Jordan, Sean John by Sean Combs, Selena Gomez, Carlos Santana, and Daisy Fuentes are increasingly outstripping those of traditional fashion designers.

This is the brave new world we find ourselves in, one where the lines between celebrity and fashion designer have become blurred. How we got here—and what this means for the future of fashion—will be the story that unfolds in this book.

We start where else but in Paris.

Chapter One

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Old Hollywood and the Roots of Fashion’s Celebrity Obsessions

Fashion designers came into being in the nineteenth century, because the emperor of France wanted a trophy wife.

In 1858, Napol�on III hired an innovative English tailor, Charles Frederick Worth, to create a magnificent wardrobe suitable for the new age of mass media—for his beautiful young wife, Eug�nie.

Thus, the blue-eyed redhead, Empress Eug�nie, became the world’s first supermodel. As she carried out her public duties, she became a celebrity icon—and a walking advertisement for Worth’s exquisite creations, like his bustle gowns, which rendered all those cumbersome hoopskirts of the era obsolete. Worth painstakingly confected one hundred innovative new gowns for her to wear for the official opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt in 1869. Her appearances at “the great State balls, the more intimate receptions at the Tuileries, the races at Longchamp served the same function as today’s runway fashion shows,” wrote historian Olivier Corteaux. Drawings of Eug�nie were displayed in shop windows across Europe and America, as legions of well-to-do women started wearing her signature “empress blue,” and her “� l’Imperatrice” coiffure.

The talented Mr. Worth—who was said to have taught himself ...

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