Playing Dress Up

“For Salma”—as in Hayek—“I need size-wise 6,” Zoe instructed a Choo rep in her acute northern New Jersey accent. Zoe picked up a strappy gold leather stiletto, and pointed out others in silver and bronze, reserving them for actress and screenwriter Julie Delpy. She picked out a pair of black

platforms, too. “Can we do a jewel on the platform?” she asked pointedly. The Jimmy Choo rep nodded and scribbled.

Zoe—pronounced “Zo,” like “snow”—is one of Hollywood’s top celebrity stylists, the fashionistas who are paid thousands of dollars a day to dress film, TV and music stars. A decade ago, the job of celebrity stylist didn’t even exist. But with the onslaught of premieres, charity galas and awards programs—along with the proliferation of paparazzi, celebrity magazines and entertainment TV shows—stars are now required to look as if they’ve stepped out of the pages of Vogue 24/7. The result: stylists have become as essential in Hollywood as publicists, personal assistants, trainers and chefs. Stylists attend fashion shows and shop incessantly to pull together the hippest, sexiest, most glamorous wardrobes possible for their clients. For big events—including next week’s Emmys—stylists are on hand to dress their celebrity clients, adding jewels and tying sashes just right.

It’s a role that’s turned them into important players in the luxury-goods industry, the $157 billion business dominated by companies like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, Dior and Chanel. Most of these companies were founded a century ago as simple one-man or one-woman shops that sold beautifully handcrafted pieces to the rich. But in the past two decades, business tycoons have taken over many of these old houses and turned them into multibillion-dollar global brands. To maximize profits, luxury brands have expanded down-market, targeting middle-class shoppers by offering lower-priced goods like logo-covered T-shirts, sunglasses and handbags.

They’ve rolled out thousands of new stores in such tourist destinations Las Vegas and Waikiki; they’ve also opened discount outlets to sell their leftovers at 50 to 75 percent off retail price. To reach this broader audience, luxury firms have also supersized their ad budgets. At Gucci, ad spending went from $5.9 million (or 2.9 percent of revenue) in 1993 to $86 million (or 7 percent of revenue) in 1999. It’s a strategy that’s paid off. From 1994 to 1999, Gucci’s sales rose from $264 million to $1.2 billion. By 2004, CEO Robert Polet declared that he planned to double Gucci’s $2 billion in revenue by 2011—a goal the firm is well on its way to achieving.

But despite the new products, new outlets and XXL ad budgets, the cheapest and most effective way for luxury brands to gain attention is by dressing celebrities. “If you’ve got the right actress or actor walking up the red carpet, saying that designer’s name over and over, you get the heat,” says Lisa Schiek, former Gucci Group communications director. “The magnitude is awesome.” Stylists like Zoe understand the power they wield. Every decision she makes, she says, could mean “a million dollars of free advertising.”

There is nothing new about movie stars’ ability to drive fashion sales. When Joan Crawford wore a white Adrian-designed gown in the film “Letty Lynton” in 1932, Macy’s sold half a million copies. The dress worn by Grace Kelly for her 1956 wedding to Monaco’s Prince Rainier III was one of the most copied ever. During Hollywood’s Golden era, the biggest stars relied on studio costume designers to pick out their clothing for a night on the town. That changed in the 1950s, after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as the Hollywood Anti-Trust Case forced studios to change the way they did business. Like actors and actresses, costume designers were no longer kept on contract; instead they became free agents who jumped from one movie to the next.

With no more studio costumers to provide glamorous wardrobes gratis, stars were forced to shop themselves for premieres and awards shows. The problem was, most stars didn’t have cultivated taste. L.A.’s reputation as a laid-back city accentuated the problem. Folks knew how to dress down, but no one knew how to dress up anymore. Society ladies, such as Betsey Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan, still had designers like James Galanos to dress them in southern California couture, but most other celebrities dressed themselves, sometimes with disastrous results. Who could forget when Demi Moore walked the Oscar red carpet in 1989 in a black cape and spandex bicycle pants? Celebrities needed guidance, someone with good taste to dress them as elegantly as their predecessors. Giorgio Armani was happy to oblige.

Armani was part of a new generation of Italian ready-to-wear designers who emerged in the 1970s, turning the industrial city of Milan into an important fashion capital almost overnight. Armani, a handsome, quiet man, invented what became known as the soft suit, which abandoned the traditional stiff English wools and flannels in navy, black and charcoal in favor of lighter, pliable fabrics such as linen, wool jersey and woven textiles. Originally he created the look for men, but he quickly adapted it to create women’s suits, too. “This was the time of feminism,” Armani told NEWSWEEK. “Women needed clothing that went much further than the little dress or a tight little suit—clothing that provided strength and power.”

Armani’s conquest of Hollywood began when a then unknown actor named Richard Gere wore Armani suits in the 1980 film “American Gigolo.” Armani’s soft suits swayed with Gere’s swagger; his tight shirts sculpted Gere’s buff torso, making him appear casually formal and heart-stoppingly sexy. The movie lifted Armani’s fashion reputation, but the company’s U.S. sales were $14 million, a mere 10 percent of its worldwide total. Armani realized that along with wider U.S. distribution, he needed a better way to reach a broader American audience—and he could do it dressing stars. “I needed to have the right people wearing my clothes the right way,” he says.

In New York, Armani hired Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as his “special-events coordinator.” Radziwill wore Armani everywhere she went—the ballet, the opera, charity galas—and soon enough, her much-photographed socialite friends were wearing Armani, too. In Hollywood, Armani hired Wanda McDaniel, a well-connected society editor who’d been a bridesmaid at Maria Shriver’s 1986 wedding to Arnold Schwarzenegger. McDaniel had just the right mix of conservative smarts and Hollywood savvy, and it became her job to get Hollywood players to wear Armani.

McDaniel lunched with celebrity publicists, managers and agents. Armani swiftly became the uniform for producers, executives and power brokers in town. Her big coup came after the 1989 Oscars. There, Jodie Foster accepted her Best Actress award for “The Accused” while wearing a baby blue taffeta ball gown with a giant bow on the derriere that she bought while shopping in Milan. “Everyone blasted her for it,” remembers McDaniel, who immediately called and offered to dress Foster in Armani for next year’s Oscars. “Jodie said, ‘You know what? You can do this for the rest of my life’.”

Foster soon had plenty of company. For the 1990 Oscars, McDaniel dressed Jessica Tandy, Lena Olin, Dan Aykroyd, Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Steve Murphy, Jeff Goldblum, Dennis Hopper and the ceremony’s host, Billy Crystal. For Michelle Pfeiffer, McDaniel not only chose the dress, but when Pfeiffer showed up with woefully understated jewelry, McDaniel pulled off her own diamond wedding ring and put it on Pfeiffer’s finger. Women’s Wear Daily dubbed the event the “Armani Awards,” and sales soared. Between 1990 and 1993, Armani’s worldwide revenue doubled to $442 million. “McDaniel singlehandedly changed the paradigm,” said Jennifer Meyer, Ralph Lauren’s West Coast liaison at the time.

Competitors tried to mimic the strategy. Rival fashion houses tried to hire McDaniel, but she stayed with Armani. Calvin Klein began staging West Coast salons at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where a select group of celebrities—including Meg Ryan and Goldie Hawn—could pick up his frocks at discount prices. Designers started luring stars to sit in the front row of their fashion shows in Paris and Milan by offering free trips and free clothes. This celebrity courtship grew as magazines devoted to celebrity style sprouted, beginning with In Style in August 1993. Fashion magazines, such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, began to put celebrities instead of models on their covers. “The bottom line is celebrities sell much better,” says Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour.

During the early 1990s, the fashion houses were able to court the celebrities directly. But as more designers began wooing stars, the celebrities needed a smart guide to choose among the growing options. So celebrities began hiring their own stylists, who attended the salons to choose clothing, jewelry and shoes on their behalf. Many of these stylists had worked as editors at fashion magazines, dressing models for shoots or catalogs. Their work can be meticulous: 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.

“No matter how beautiful actresses are, they don’t know how to dress,” says Kelly Cutrone, founder of the fashion PR 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 become fashion stars themselves. Jessica Paster made her name at the 1998 Oscars when she dressed 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. L’Wren Scott, the 6-foot-4 raven-haired girlfriend of Mick Jagger, is a former model whose style is sophisticated and very haute couture; her premier client is Nicole Kidman. Phillip Bloch, a former model turned fashion stylist, dressed Halle Berry for the 2002 Oscars in a sheer burgundy gown with saronglike 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.

Zoe remains the hottest stylist in the business, with clients who’ve included Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton and Jessica Simpson. Raised in New Jersey, Zoe began reading Vogue and bought her first Louis Vuitton bag at age 13. She studied sociology and psychology at George Washington University, and thought about becoming a psychiatrist. Instead, she joined YM magazine, rising to senior fashion editor before going freelance. She soon had a host of private clients, including the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Enrique Iglesias. Her work has made her controversial: some of her best-known clients are severely thin, leading critics to question whether Zoe is a good influence on her so-called “Zoe Clones.” Zoe has denied she tells clients to diet.

Some of her clients have great style and simply need help putting everything together. Others need a complete work-up: 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 from the minute they leave their houses in the morning till the minute they go to sleep,” says Zoe, 36. As New York designer Michael Kors observes, “Rachel has found a way of making those girls look intriguing and fabulous when they’re running out for a Starbucks.”

During awards season, Zoe gets 300 phone calls and 200 e-mails a day. Wealthy families have offered her up to $20,000 to take their daughters shopping in Paris. And in the weeks leading up to the Oscars, she and her two assistants work nearly round the clock. For the 2006 Oscars, Zoe personally helped dress her highest-profile client, Keira Knightley, in a Vera Wang one-shouldered burgundy taffeta gown, while her assistants were dispatched to attend to other clients. “You need to have someone on hand in case of a fashion emergency, like a broken zipper or a popped button,” Zoe says.

When her clients step out of the limo, millions of dollars hang in the balance. According to a study conducted by Cotton Incorporated in 2004, 27 percent of female shoppers ages 20 to 24 said they got clothing ideas from watching celebrities, up from 15 percent in 1994. In the 25 to 34 age bracket, it jumped from 10 percent in 1994 to 18 percent in 2004. But all of that is rapidly changing. Two years ago, a scandal erupted during Oscar week when the Los Angeles Times reported that a handful of stars had been paid more than $100,000 by luxury brands to wear their products on the red carpet. In fact, “red-carpet revenue,” as the practice has been dubbed, is becoming increasingly—if quietly—routine. Big Hollywood talent agencies now have agents who negotiate contracts with luxury brands to dress celebrities for public appearances. “I often get calls from agents asking if we want to dress their star for a fee,” said one Hollywood luxury-brand representative who does not pay stars. Many in the business, however, believe red-carpet revenue will soon become the status quo, severely curtailing the power, and client base, of celebrity stylists.

Zoe doesn’t seem worried. She has parlayed her styling into other gigs. She has written a fashion guide, “Style A to Zoe: The Art of Fashion, Beauty, & Everything Glamour,” which comes out this fall. She’s designing a handbag line for Judith Leiber. She’s signed on as creative consultant for the Halston brand. And even as she spends less time in closets choosing celebrity frocks, she sees no shortage of potential clients begging for her help. Style, after all, will never go out of style.

title: “Playing Dress Up” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-14” author: “Elizabeth Sweat”