Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (11 page)

The Vuitton stores kicked off a luxury architecture war in Japan. In
2001
, Hermès inaugurated a stunning $
137
million twelve-story glass-brick tower designed by Renzo Piano in Ginza with fourteen hundred square feet of rich retail space, a workshop, executive offices, an art gallery, and a forty-seat film screening room. The first dramatic architectural luxury tower in Tokyo, it replaced a small café. In
2003
, Prada built an $
80
million six-story temple to postmodernism on Omotesando designed by the Swiss architecture firm of Herzog & de Meuron—the folks who did the Tate Modern in London. With its striking five-sided facade of clear bubble-like glass in a twisted harlequin pattern, the Prada store seems to draw more tourists snapping pictures than shoppers laying out the plastic. And in December
2004
, Chanel christened its Ginza building. The property, previously a Warner Bros. store with a giant TV screen playing Bugs Bunny shorts, cost Chanel a staggering $
117
million at auction. It took three months to knock down the existing building and another fourteen and a half for Peter Marino to construct a new one.

It’s quite a building. There are ten floors, including about fourteen thousand square feet of shopping space done up in absurdly expensive materials. There is glittering silver dust on the pillars, woven gold-ribbon panels on the walls, and an underground customer parking lot (a rarity in Tokyo) with Andy Warhol’s
Chanel No. 5
image to greet you when you pull in. Above the store there are plush executive office suites with expansive windows; a vast multipurpose cultural space called Nexus Hall that hosts classical music concerts and photography exhibits in conjunction with the Bibliotèque Nationale de France; a rooftop terrace with Japanese bamboo and water gardens; and on the top floor, with a commanding view of the city, the Alain Ducasse restaurant Beige Tokyo. “I wanted the best chef in the world,” Richard Collasse, Chanel Japan’s president, says quite simply.

Marino’s pièce de résistance is the facade, which took up half of the building’s construction budget: a gigantic curtain wall of Privalite glass with seven hundred thousand embedded light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that at night project swirling black-and-white images of Chanel symbols such as the interlocking Cs, the tweed pattern and camellias, making it effectively the largest television screen in the world. The total cost of the building was reportedly $
240
million. Collasse will only say that it cost twice as much as “good-quality building” in Tokyo. A year and a half after it opened, there were still lines out front. Chanel president Françoise Montenay told me that she expected the store to recoup its investment in three years.

R
ACHEL
Z
OE
blew into the Jimmy Choo Oscar Suite on the fifth floor of the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel on a rainy February morning in
2005
like she owned the joint. Dressed in a black fitted Roberto Cavalli jacket with fur cuffs, tight skinny jeans, a Chloé belt, and five-inch-high stiletto boots with buckles, she air-kissed Sandra Choi, niece of the London-based luxury shoe company’s namesake, and clocked the crowd in a swift
360
-degree glance. Choi, the company’s creative director, and Tamara Mellon, its glam jet-set founder and president, booked the suite to receive socialites, starlets, and A-list stylists looking for shoes to borrow for the myriad dinners and parties later in the week, culminating with the seventy-seventh Academy Awards on Sunday night. Swishing her long Botticelli ringlets out of the way, and with notebook-wielding Choi by her side, Zoe cut through the sea of tea-and champagne-sipping faux blondes and headed straight into the bedroom of the buttercup yellow suite. The bed, dresser, desk, and armoire had been replaced with long banquet tables, each covered with white linen tablecloths, huge bouquets of white roses and tulips, and scores of dangerously tall and wildly expensive women’s shoes.

“For Salma”—as in Hayek—“I need size-wise
6
,” Zoe instructed Choi in her acute northern New Jersey accent. “She called me this morning. ‘Rachel, I need
five
inches!’” Choi nodded and jotted it down. Zoe picked up a strappy gold leather stiletto, handed it to Choi to note, and pointed out others in silver and bronze. They were for Julie Delpy, who was nominated for best original screenplay for
Before Sunset.
“I’m not sure what her jewelry is going to be,” Zoe explained, “so I’d like to keep it open.”

She scanned the table again. “These are fabulous,” she declared of a bronze pair that tied around the ankle. She picked out a pair of black platforms, too. “Can we do a jewel on the platform?” she asked pointedly. Choi nodded and scribbled. “Great,” Zoe concluded. She turned to leave but spied another table in the back corner. “Holy crap! Holy crap!” she wailed as she cradled a pair of purple satin pumps with big jeweled buckles. “This is incredible! And look at this,” pawing a pair of five-inch silver-strap stilettos. “I could
cry
!”

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, all of which require stars to look as if they have stepped out of the pages of
Vogue,
stylists have become as essential in Hollywood as publicists, personal assistants, trainers, and chefs. Stylists attend fashion shows and visit showrooms in Paris, Milan, New York, and Los Angeles, scan fashion Web sites like Style.com, and shop incessantly to pull together the hippest, sexiest, most glamorous wardrobes possible for their clients. For big events, like the Oscars or Golden Globes, stylists are on hand to dress the celebrity, add jewels, and tie sashes just right. Whenever a top celebrity does a “public appearance”—from a chat on
David Letterman
to a stroll before cameras on a red carpet—you can be sure a stylist has helped create the look. The result for the luxury brands, Zoe explains, is “a million dollars of free advertising.”

For most of their existence, luxury brands had not advertised. Leather goods houses such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci ran some ads in magazines, and couture houses such as Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent hawked their perfumes and cosmetics. But, as Arie Kopelman, former president of Chanel Inc., explained to me, luxury executives and designers “thought it an anathema to advertise fashion, that it would cheapen the business.” The generation of designers that hit big in the
1970
s, including Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace in Milan, and Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein in New York, changed that perspective. They hired fashion’s top photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bruce Weber and supermodels such as Janice Dickinson, Jerry Hall, and Brooke Shields to star in their campaigns, which ran in fashion and art magazines. In
1987
, Chanel couturier Karl Lagerfeld, an accomplished amateur photographer, started shooting the house’s fashion ads himself. Other brands followed. “The industry became more competitive, and you had to be more aggressive,” Kopelman explained. “Advertising played a role in that marketing.”

As the industry grew in the
1990
s, so did advertising. Gucci nearly doubled its ad expenditure from $
5
.
9
million, or
2
.
9
percent of revenues, in
1993
to $
11
.
6
million, or
4
.
6
percent, in
1994
. By
1999
, Gucci’s advertising and communication budget had grown to
7
percent, or about $
86
million, of its $
1
.
2
billion sales turnover. In
2000
, advertising for the entire group reached approximately $
250
million, or
13
percent of sales. LVMH spent more than $
1
billion in advertising—or
11
percent of sales—in
2002
, making it the largest advertising buyer in fashion magazines. “We are the largest luxury goods advertiser in the world,” Arnault once boasted. “I cannot tell you the exact savings—I cannot give away my secrets—but it is obvious that the more you buy, the better [deal] you get.”

Designers, or creative directors as they rechristened themselves in the
1990
s, became an integral part of the process. They dreamed up ad concepts, chose the models and photographers—Lagerfeld continued to shoot Chanel fashion campaigns himself—and became the spokesmen for their brands. At Gucci, for example, “Domenico [De Sole] and Tom [Ford] sat down and said, ‘How are we going to turn Gucci around?’” recalled Gucci’s then–chief financial officer Robert Singer in
2001
. “And they said, ‘We’ll make Tom a star.’” Ford sat for magazine profiles and TV interviews—often at one of his spectacular homes—held news-making press conferences, and swirled with the jet set, his goings-on tracked by gossip columns. Soon Ford and Gucci became synonymous for a hedonistic lifestyle that, Singer said, “became the platform for selling incredible quantities of handbags.”

It worked for a while. But soon, as Claus Lindorff of the BETC Luxe advertising agency in Paris explained, luxury brands realized they needed more than “a pretty girl in a pretty picture.” They needed real people who had an air of glamour about them.

They needed Hollywood.

H
OLLYWOOD HAS A LONG
and deep relationship with luxury. During the Golden Age, from the
1920
s to the early
1960
s, when powerful moguls such as Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer were in charge of the studios and ran them like kingdoms, movies were rich. Characters had posh accents, lived in grand homes, employed staff, dressed extravagantly, and made audiences dream. The primary creators of these dreams were the costumers—the studios’ in-house designers who came up with and produced the outfits for everyone in a film from the leading lady to the extras. Back in the
1930
s, the bias-cut gowns that MGM’s costumer Adrian designed for Greta Garbo were so sublime that fans wrote to her begging to buy them. Paramount costumer Travis Banton’s glittering gowns and slim tuxedos “made Dietrich,” Diana Vreeland declared, and Edith Head’s structured, voluminous couture turned several of Alfred Hitchcock’s blond heroines into style role models. Columbia Studios’ French-born costume designer Jean Louis designed with such flair that he became known as Hollywood’s Prince of Glamour. Among his masterpieces were Rita Hayworth’s black satin hourglass gown in
Gilda
and the sheer beaded chiffon second skin that Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy. When Kim Novak went to the Cannes Film Festival in
1956
for
Picnic,
she told me, “I had two trunks of incredible wardrobe, these fabulous gowns that Jean Louis at the studio designed and they were absolutely magnificent. I swept Prince Aly Khan off his feet.”

Stars relished this
richesse.
Silent-screen siren Gloria Swanson swathed herself in liquid satin gowns, sparkling diamonds, mink, and ermine, both on and off screen; Pinkerton security guards would arrive at her studio dressing room with chests of gems to dress up her costumes. “The public wanted us to live like kings and queens,” Swanson explained, “and we did.” Joan Crawford was known to change her clothes up to ten times a day. “She had a special outfit for answering the fan mail,” cracked director Joseph Mankiewicz. She’d travel with more than three dozen suitcases and had her hip flasks made to match her ensembles. She had her favorite hats copied a dozen times in different colors and at one point she owned sixteen fur coats. “I look at them and I know that I’m a star,” she pronounced. Crawford once claimed that more money was spent on her wardrobe, per movie, than on the script.

“Actresses had a lot of taste themselves—and if they didn’t have it initially, they developed it,” actress Olivia de Havilland, best known for her role as Melanie in the
1939
epic
Gone with the Wind,
told me over tea in her Paris townhouse one winter afternoon. “You absorbed a lot. You knew it was an essential part of being in that profession because there was the public expectation. I remember I went to a film and during the intermission, the actress Frances Farmer—long before her breakdown—wasn’t carelessly dressed but underdressed and under-made-up and I heard someone say, ‘That’s Frances Farmer—oh, my.’ I myself was much more careful after that. It was such a responsibility to be impeccable.”

Movie stars’ marketing power was formidable. When Crawford wore a white Adrian-designed gown with organdy ruffled shoulders in
Letty Lynton
in
1932
, Macy’s sold half a million copies. Grace Kelly’s wedding dress, designed by MGM’s Helen Rose for Kelly’s
1956
marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco, was one of the most copied ever. Hollywood stars endorsed clothes for the Sears Roebuck catalog and sold their signatures for labels. To have a dress with Shirley Temple’s or Joan Crawford’s embroidered autograph on the label was the bee’s knees.

When it came time to choose the wardrobe for a film, French actress Leslie Caron, who arrived in Hollywood in
1950
to star in
An American in Paris,
remembers, “You went to the salons, which was like a couture salon with two dressing rooms, and everything was brought to you. Helen [Rose] was capable of gently persuading you if this or that was fitting, but you certainly had a say. Every star had her own style. I was forever trying to do French fashions and get away from the Hollywood look, which had a lack of simplicity and too much froufrou. The studio made my premiere dresses, too, and if you had to go to the Oscars, they would do a dress for you, especially if your film was nominated.”

The best shoemaker in town was Salvatore Ferragamo, an ambitious cobbler from a remote village east of Naples, Italy. He originally settled in Santa Barbara, California, in
1914
, where he and his brothers opened a shop and made cowboy boots and shoes for the American Film Company’s movies. The studio’s actresses—Mary Pickford and her sister Lottie, Pola Negri, and Dolores del Rio—so loved Ferragamo’s shoes for their film roles that they went by the shop and ordered pumps for their personal wardrobes. In the early
1920
s, Ferragamo moved to Los Angeles and opened the Hollywood Boot Shop on the corner of Las Palmas and Hollywood boulevards. He created “Roman” sandals for Cecil B. DeMille’s epics, including
The Ten Commandments
and
The King of Kings,
and shod the floor-show dancers at Grauman’s Egyptian and Chinese Theaters. He made shoes to order for Rudolph Valentino, Lillian Gish, Clara Bow, and John Barrymore, and he created a pair of one-of-a-kind pumps covered in hummingbird feathers for a princess visiting from India, for which he was paid a staggering $
500
, the highest price he ever received for a pair of shoes.

Ferragamo got caught up in Hollywood’s social swirl. “Valentino would drop into my house on Beachwood Drive to eat a bowl of spaghetti cooked as he had liked it in Italy. He was a beautiful boy, always impeccably debonair,” Ferragamo wrote in his memoir,
Shoemaker of Dreams
. “John Barrymore, that perfect actor, used to drop into my shop for a drink as well as to buy shoes. It being the time of Prohibition, drink was difficult to obtain, and anyone who was lucky enough to come across a spare bottle promptly drank it.” At parties “attended by virtually every star in Hollywood—those who could tolerate one another—from Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks downward,” Ferragamo recalled, he played barman, whipping up his own concoctions like “Green,” made of mint and rum, and “Roscata,” which was gin, bitters, a dash of brandy, and a lot of ice. Though he was friendly with his clientele, Ferragamo understood that “the world’s stars do not come to my salon to buy my reputation; they come to buy shoes that fit and flatter them.”

Paris couture’s relationship to Hollywood back then was limited and at times downright tenuous. Coco Chanel traveled there in the early
1930
s to costume a handful of pictures but quickly grew frustrated and returned to Paris. Dior made clothes for a few of his favorite clients, including Marlene Dietrich for Alfred Hitchcock’s
Stage Fright
and Olivia de Havilland and her co-star, Myrna Loy, for Norman Krasna’s
The Ambassador’s Daughter.
But in
1955
, Dior refused to provide a wedding dress for Brigitte Bardot to wear in the French film
La Mariée est trop belle.
“There was no way Dior would risk incurring the displeasure of some of his most elegant clients by allowing his dresses to be put on vulgar display on the screen,” wrote biographer Marie-France Pochna in
Christian Dior: The Man Who Made the World Look New
. “Dior was a snob. He ranked living, breathing aristocrats far higher aesthetically than their pale imitations on stage and screen.”