Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (14 page)

Though it was quickly becoming “a crowded field,” as McDaniel recalls, dressing stars still remained an intimate affair, like it was back in those studio wardrobe-department days. “The celebrities would come in directly to see us,” McDaniel said. They’d have tea and chat in the third-floor VIP lounge as they tried on the latest evening wear, then afterward maybe go down to the store and do a little shopping. It was a friendly business arrangement, a personal service.

“Then suddenly,” McDaniel remembers, “somebody else came in for them.”

S
TYLISTS ARE A RELATIVELY
new phenomenon in fashion. Originally, stylists worked as fashion editors, dressing—or “styling”—models for fashion shoots for magazines and catalogs. But as the number of formal affairs exploded in the
1990
s, from the Oscars and a few premieres to an avalanche of paparazzi-lined red-carpet events, stylists saw the birth of a new niche: dressing celebrities. Stylists went freelance and started signing up movie, television, and music stars. A stylist’s job, as Rachel Zoe explains, is to do “everything”: shopping, putting outfits together, dressing the star, creating a coherent look that reflects what the star’s image is, or what he or she wants their image to be, in the public mind. When a star embarks on a media tour, the stylist will put together a notebook filled with Polaroids of outfits—“from bra to shoes,” Zoe says—with notes indicating which one to wear to which event as well as which to wear if it rains or if it is nice out. “No matter how beautiful actresses are, they don’t know how to dress,” says Kelly Cutrone, founder of the fashion public relations firm People’s Revolution. “They need to be told how to say the designer’s name—it’s
Jeee-van-shee,
not
Ga-vin-chee
—and how to put a dress on—what’s the front and the back—and how to walk in that shoe. They are in way over their heads. And that’s where the stylist steps in: they are replacing what studios used to do.”

Soon the stylists began to take credit for their work and became fashion stars themselves. Jessica Paster made her name at the Oscars in
1998
when she dressed two Best Supporting Actress nominees: Kim Basinger in an Escada pistachio silk taffeta ball gown and Minnie Driver in a Halston blood-red jersey column with a matching fur stole. When Basinger won for her role in
L.A. Confidential
, Escada’s—and Paster’s—profile soared. Since then, Paster has dressed Cate Blanchett, Uma Thurman, Naomi Watts, Joan Allen, and Kate Beckinsale. L’Wren Scott, the six-feet-four raven-haired girlfriend of Mick Jagger, is a former model who started her styling career doing photo shoots for Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts. Scott’s signature style is sophisticated and very haute couture—more aspiration than accessible. Her premier client is Nicole Kidman, but she has also dressed Marisa Tomei and Sarah Jessica Parker. Phillip Bloch, a former model turned fashion stylist, famously dressed Halle Berry for the
2002
Oscars in a sheer burgundy gown with sarong-like skirt by the then–relatively unknown Lebanese designer Elie Saab. The move simultaneously catapulted Berry, who won the Best Actress award, to best-dressed lists and Saab to the level of Paris couturier. Bloch wrote a book called
Elements of Style: From the Portfolio of Hollywood’s Premier Stylist,
became a spokesman for Lycra and Visa, and in
2007
was launching a luxury shoe and a middle-market lifestyle collection that he described as “Hollywood glamour for the masses.”

Rachel Zoe was perhaps the hottest stylist in the business when I met her at the Jimmy Choo Oscar salon in
2005
. Her client list read like Page Six of the
New York Post:
along with Salma Hayek and Julie Delpy, she handled Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton, and Jessica Simpson. Some have great style and simply needed help putting everything together. Others need a complete workup: a total, seamless new look. For a reported $
6
,
000
a day, Zoe provides it, turning T-shirt-and-jeans devotees into luxury brand fashion plates.

“Those girls get photographed going to dinner,” Zoe explained. “They get photographed going to lunch. They get photographed from the minute they leave their houses in the morning till the minute they go to sleep.” As New York designer Michael Kors noted, “We’ve never lived in such a paparazzi moment. So many women get their fashion information by looking at a tabloid, and [Rachel] has found a way of making those girls look intriguing and fabulous when they’re running out for a Starbucks.” By the summer of
2006
, Zoe had become so influential that you could see references to her trademark look on luxury brand runways. And her fans are legion. At the Armani couture show in Paris, one girl standing behind me gasped, “There’s Rachel Zoe!” when Zoe dashed in at the last minute. “She’s the best stylist in Hollywood today!” At some shows, Zoe has been asked for an autograph.

Rachel Zoe Rosenzweig—her agent convinced her to lose the complicated last name in
1997
—was born in New York in
1971
to an engineer and his Berkeley-grad wife and raised in Short Hills, New Jersey, the younger of two daughters. Early on, Zoe realized she had champagne tastes. “I was reading
Vogue
at thirteen and was always attracted to luxury,” she says. “My father always said he could drop me in a five-and-dime and I could find the one thing that was a dollar.” During a family vacation to Paris when she was thirteen, Zoe took her savings and bought a messenger-style monogram satchel at Louis Vuitton. She still has it, and keeps it in a closet with her several hundred other Vuitton bags. She studied sociology and psychology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and worked as a hostess at the Mona Lisa restaurant in Georgetown, where she met a dashing waiter named Rodger Berman and fell in love. They married in
1998
. He worked for a few years as an investment banker. Now he is now president of Recognition Media, a company that owns awards shows, such as the Webby Awards for excellence on the Internet. After Zoe finished her undergraduate studies, she thought about pursuing postgraduate work to become a psychiatrist but opted instead to look for a job. A friend of a friend told her about an opening as a fashion assistant at
YM
magazine. She thought, “Why not?” and got it: three days a week at $
75
a day. Within three years, she was
YM
’s senior fashion editor. “I loved it so much, I decided to do it the rest of my life,” she says. In
1997
, she went freelance, styling for fashion magazines. Often her subjects were celebrities and on occasion they asked if she could help them dress for red-carpet appearances. Soon Zoe had a host of private clients, including the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and Enrique Iglesias.

Zoe’s trademark style—for herself as well as her clients—is
Saturday Night Fever
meets early Cher: for day, skinny cropped jeans, little fitted jackets, reptile-skin stilettos, and gobs of chains; for night, clingy goddess gowns. Her favorite designers are Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, Christian Lacroix, John Galliano, Marc Jacobs, and Tom Ford. “If I ever got a tattoo it would be ‘Tom Ford Lives Forever,’” she gushed to
Harper’s Bazaar
in
2005
. She also collects and uses a lot of vintage clothing, particularly from Halston, Pucci, and Yves Saint Laurent. Zoe has even reached into her personal wardrobe of free clothes to dress her “girls” Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, and Jessica Simpson, prompting the fashion press to dub them “Zoe Clones.”

She’s parlayed her styling into other gigs, including contributing regularly to
Cosmopolitan,
appearing on
Oprah,
and designing a capsule collection of handbags for Judith Leiber. She is so famous for her taste that now she gets requests from the rich and unfamous to help them, too. “People come in to L.A. for three days and want to pay me $
20
,
000
a day to take them shopping,” she says incredulously. “I have someone who wants to fly me to Paris to take their daughter shopping.” She also consults for various luxury designers for red-carpet appearances, giving them design suggestions. “The designers don’t have time to know their clients—they’re too busy with their collections,” Zoe explains. “And the media pressure is immense. That’s why I have my job, because the media feels there is a sense of power and influence of style. Clients come to me now—or their agents and publicists—and say, ‘Help! Help! Help!’” In March
2007
, she joined the advisory board and signed on as the creative consultant for Halston, the legendary
1970
s American fashion brand that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein had just purchased.

While Zoe is constantly busy dressing her clients, Oscar season is “colossal mayhem,” she says with a laugh. “You can forget sleeping between January and March. A million fittings, gathering accessories. Me and my two assistants drinking coffee at midnight. I get three hundred phone calls and two hundred e-mails a day.” She has one primary rule: “There should never be more than two dresses from the same house on the red carpet.” To avoid this, Zoe normally asks for exclusivity from a brand. “It protects the brand from overexposure,” she said, “and most importantly, it protects my client.” In
2006
, Zoe had Jennifer Garner, who was presenting; Keira Knightley, who was nominated for Best Actress; and six clients attending the
Vanity Fair
party who needed to be as glamorous as the movie stars. On Oscar day, Zoe personally helped dress her highest-profile client, Knightley, in a Vera Wang one-shouldered burgundy taffeta gown, while her assistants were dispatched to attend to her other clients. “You need to have someone on hand in case of a fashion emergency, like a broken zipper or a popped button,” Zoe explained.

Luxury brands go extraordinary lengths to get their products on those red-carpet arrivals. They send unsolicited packages of goodies—known as “swag” in the biz—to celebrities year-round, usually via their publicists. “That’s what I’m here for—to handle the avalanche,” Troy Nankin—publicist for such stars as Hilary Swank, Angie Harmon, and Selma Blair—told me. “I send it to the mom or to a charity. Escada sent these purses around before Christmas, and then
US Weekly
runs a photo of Selma Blair with a caption that reads ‘Selma Blair loves her new Escada bag.’ No, Selma Blair’s
maid
loves her new bag.” The Oscars traditionally have been the ultimate swagfests. Presenters received gigantic baskets of freebies—including exotic trips, luxury watches, and camcorders—that were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Academy until the IRS came down on them. The Academy voted to discontinue the practice as of
2007
. Luxury brands, on their own, swag nominees and presenters too. In
2005
, the London-based leather goods company Anya Hindmarch, for example, gave each Best Actress and Supporting Actress nominee a Bespoke Ebury chocolate leather tote embossed with a personal message from their director or co-star and stuffed with Revlon products.

Perhaps the most visible effort luxury brands make to dress celebrities for the Oscars is to set up salons at the finest addresses around town, such as the Jimmy Choo Oscar Suite at the Peninsula. They invite A-list and B-list celebrities, publicists, agents, and stylists such as Zoe to come by for lunch, tea, or drinks to check out their latest, most fabulous wares—all available to “borrow” for the red carpet. For small companies like Jimmy Choo, an Oscar salon is a bonanza of publicity. “When you put a pair of glamorous shoes on a stunning actress about to receive an award, well, you can’t beat that,” says Jimmy Choo creative director Sandra Choi. “Everybody who watches the show, or reads about it, knows we took part. Everything we have here is in the store and they can come in and buy a piece of that glamour.” Most of the time, as Choi points out, no one can see the Choos underneath the long gowns. But every chance an actress gets, she’ll mention to a television commentator or reporter that she’s wearing Choos and give a little flash of ankle to prove it. She’ll also say who loaned (or gave) her the dress, jewels, and handbag. The morning after a red-carpet event, Choo, like all the other major luxury brands that dress stars, e-mails a press release to reporters around the globe that details who wore which Choo shoes, often with a red-carpet photo attached. Says Choi: “The mileage for the rest of the year is phenomenal.”

The impact on the public is profound. According to a study conducted by Cotton Incorporated in
2004
,
27
percent of female shoppers ages twenty to twenty-four said they got clothing ideas from watching celebrities, up from
15
percent in
1994
. In the twenty-five to thirty-four bracket, it jumped from
10
percent in
1994
to
18
percent in
2004
. For women ages thirty-five to forty-four, it was
14
percent, up from
8
percent in
1994
.

In February
2005
, I decided to see the salonfest firsthand. I checked into the Chateau Marmont, a favorite old Hollywood hotel for movie and fashion sorts, got in contact with luxury brand and product placement publicists, and the invitations rolled in. Right there at the Chateau, in one of the Craig Ellwood–designed
1950
s bungalows in the garden, French designer Roland Mouret showed his recent couture collection to stylists and their celebrities. He wound up dressing Cate Blanchett and Selma Blair for events during the week, and Scarlett Johansson for the Oscars ceremony. In the
1920
s clapboard Bungalow
1
overlooking the pool, the estate jewelry company Sell Jewelry hosted a ladies’ luncheon for stylists, socialites, and fashion editors to try on vintage rings and brooches. At the Kwiat diamonds cocktail party at The Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, guests sipped “diamond-tinis”—turquoise-hued martinis sprinkled with gold dust.
W
magazine hosted an invitation-only “Hollywood Retreat,” in a mod Hollywood Hills home, where high-as well as low-wattage stars pawed through and borrowed Rena Lange clothes, Penny Preville jewels, and Jaeger-LeCoultre watches. In the back bedroom, celebrity hairdresser Chris McMillan tended to their tresses; when I was there, Paula Abdul was in his chair getting the works. Afterward, I was invited to join guests by the pool for a light “spa” lunch by top L.A. restaurant Patina.