Has Celebrity Culture Changed The Way Designers Work?
We take for granted that most of our readers have loved fashion for as long as they can remember — why else would you be here every day keeping up with the latest style news? But we’re willing to bet that every eye on this site can remember a time when it had never seen Miuccia Prada or Marc Jacobs, when they didn’t know all that much about the faces behind the labels they loved.
But all that’s changed, and it continues to change, as Rosemary Feitelberg pointed out in WWD today. More and more, designers have to be artists and executives and social media experts and brands unto themselves (Vivienne Westwood reclining for a photograph is something we’d never seen until recently). And to some minds, that aspect of the job can be just as important as the clothes:
“Savvy enough to know consumer perception is as important, if not more so, these days than actual talent, the fashion pack is tweeting, Facebooking, blogging and making TV cameos at a record pace. They need only consider the massive reach of relative fashion newbies like Kim Kardashian, Madonna and her daughter Lourdes, Lindsay Lohan, Victoria Beckham and Katy Perry to drive home the power of fame with shoppers. Business executive/reality TV star/jewelry designer Ivanka Trump tweets to nearly 800,000-plus admirers throughout her jam-packed days.”
It’s simply not enough to be a designer anymore. Now you have to be a part-time magazine editor and photographer, a la Karl Lagerfeld, or a blogger-cum-designer, like the Internet stars who designed bags for Coach. Anna Dello Russo, Vogue Nippon‘s editor, is going to release a fragrance soon.
The game has changed, and designers have to change with it to stay afloat. As the world continues to demand more and more accessible fashion, they also demand more access to the designers themselves.
And while we’re all for access, we can remember a time when there weren’t any fashion-themed reality shows, no naked Tom Ford photoshoots in Out magazine, no Diane von Furstenberg on Twitter — and certainly no Cynthia Rowley Pampers. And we have to say, we liked a little bit of mystery. But in a world where everyone has access to everything about everyone else, we might just have to let mystery go.
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