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

PROLOGUE

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

O n 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, Its very hard to understand the girls giving advice about mens fashion.

But Simpson, whose fast-growing namesake fashion label was becoming the millennial generations answer to Liz Claiborne, wasnt having it. She snapped back: Im a little bit offended. Not a little bit, a lot of bit. To talk down to a woman in this business? Were running the world right now, okay? Im 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

Simpsons 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 Simpsons 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 couldnt have been more adorable. She didnt 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 charactersbona fide and contrivedthat fed a willing publics 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 indiscretionwhether 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 celebritiesbeauty, charm, wit, talentby far the easiest thing to emulate was their clothes. No matter how much we wanted to be like Mike, we werent 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, Jessicas 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 Simpsons initial proposal, that Jessica, twenty-threejust married to Nick Lachey, twenty-nine, a member of boy band 98 Degreescould 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 preachers daughter.

The first show took place inside the couples 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 its 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.