Hijacking the Runway

September 15, 2014
Splashy critique of the celebrity sway over fashion. After scrutinizing the encroachment of casual wear into the house of haute couture in her debut (The End of Fashion, 1999), seasoned Wall Street Journal fashion journalist Agins chronicles another seminal change: the onslaught of megastar-inspired product lines diluting the industry's reputation for sartorial glitz and glamour. The author reaches back to past decades when luminaries like Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor and others cashed in on fame and "the allure of celebrity," plugging their self-branded clothing lines, perfumes and jewelry. Fully utilizing her fashion week backstage-pass privileges, Agins provides a laundry list of saleable, self-possessed celebrity-wear, from such stars as Sean Combs, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga-all best-sellers with their star power leveraged to showboat the products as must-have indulgence items. In just one of the numerous interviews from which Agins cleverly draws opinion and material, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour surprisingly voices the benefits of this celebrity influence. While the author doesn't challenge the reality of someone famous increasing the revenue of a product or service just by affixing his or her name to it, she zeroes in on the ramifications of that type of affiliation. Not one to kowtow to the mesmerizing zeal of the celebrity brand, Agins' assessments are razor-sharp and brutally honest when it comes to their blunders. She is hilariously critical of the vacuous Kardashian family and their groupies' "souvenir shop" Dash; she then cringes at a heavily marked-down "klearance" rack of their untouched, whisper-thin duds at Sears. Though the narrative is padded with pages of floridly detailed, biographical filler, Agins is masterful at fashion speculation and engagingly weighs both the positives and negatives of an industry in which "the lines between celebrity and fashion designer have become blurred." A breezy, authoritative report on the formidable culture of "[c]elebrities as billboards for fashion."

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September 15, 2014
Like her eponymous Ask Teri Wall Street Journal column, fashion-journalist and author (The End of Fashion, 1999) Agins ropes us in with her first few sentences: an exchange between Jessica Simpson and Fashion-Star contestant Nicholas Bowes. We're inextricably hooked as Agins continues, explaining the birth of celebrity fashionwith Napol'on III's hiring of designer Charles Worth to innovate for Eug'nie's closetsto its current status. All along, the People-style tidbits get our attention (Kanye West's repeatedly unsuccessful forays into fashion, for instance); Agins' reportorial credentials give her subject substance and no little gravitas. After all, fashion is a multi-billion-dollar business, and she deftly singles out those who shine, those who flunk. Expect insightful portraits of such stars as Tory Burch, Sean Combs, Tommy Hilfiger, the Olsen twins; the retailers like Macy's; the shrewd moves that designers like Michael Kors and Giorgio Armani have mastered. Photographs (not seen in galleys) accompany every chapter. At the end, though, her pointed questionCan fashion survive celebrities?is answered by what seems like a cop-out: it will depend on the well-dressed woman who is such a confident individualist that she invents her own original style by cherry-picking the best. Appended: selected list of celebrity fashion lines; selected list of celebrity fragrances.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)