by Dana Thomas
Instead, Cary Grant took her out and introduced her to all of his friends, and within a matter of months she had the town wired. Her scooplike approach to society reporting triggered an old-fashioned newspaper war with her competitor, Los Angeles Times society columnist Jody Jacobs, and she rattled the entire state of California with a frank and not terribly flattering five-part series about its former first lady Nancy Reagan that came out during the presidential campaign and included a rare interview with her father, Loyal Davis. “I tell you I thought [Nancy Reagan] was going to have my head chopped off,” McDaniel remembered, “and there were several people who opened up to me a lot and were axed from the friends’ list.” The following year, McDaniel married Albert Ruddy, the producer of such 1970s boxoffice hits as The Godfather and The Longest Yard (and most recently Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby), with a swank star-studded reception at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They became a Hollywood power couple, and she become a far-better-dressed reporter.
In May 1988, Armani hired McDaniel to be the director of entertainment industry communications. Her job: to get Hollywood players to wear Armani. McDaniel lunched with celebrity publicists, managers, and agents, and wore and preached Armani at dinner parties. Armani swiftly became the uniform for producers, executives, agents, and powerbrokers in town. But Giorgio Armani wanted more: he wanted movie stars to wear his clothes in public and cause a stir that would be captured by the paparazzi and run in papers around the world. McDaniel snagged the first one: Jodie Foster.
In 1989, Foster accepted her Best Actress Academy Award for her role as a rape victim in The Accused in a baby blue taffeta ball gown with a giant bow on the derriere that she bought while window-shopping in Milan. “Everyone blasted her for it,” remembered McDaniel. “I knew Jodie would go back to the Oscars the following year to be a presenter, so I thought, why not call her right now and say, ‘You want to commit for next year? Why don’t we get you going and know that decision is done.’ And Jodie said, ‘You know what? You can do this for the rest of my life.’”
Armani found the second one while watching a video of Brian De Palma’s 1983 epic Scarface: the willowy blond moll, Michelle Pfeiffer. McDaniel contacted Pfeiffer and offered to dress her for the Oscars, too. Together they picked out a perfect navy blue sheath. “Before I went over to her house to get her organized the afternoon of the Oscars,” McDaniel remembers, “I called and said, ‘What else are you going to be wearing?’”
“I don’t know,” Pfeiffer responded. “You’ll figure it out.”
McDaniel threw some of her own handbags and jewelry in the car, and when she arrived at Pfeiffer’s old Spanish home in Santa Monica, Pfeiffer came downstairs dressed in her Armani gown and a tiny sea pearl necklace that her boyfriend, Fisher Stevens, had given her.
“Michelle,” McDaniel said almost disapprovingly, “this is the Oscars.”
McDaniel pulled out of her sack a string of large baroque pearls and a black alligator clutch evening bag.
“But I don’t sparkle,” Pfeiffer wailed.
McDaniel slid her big diamond wedding ring off and handed it to Pfeiffer.
“Is that weird?” Pfeiffer asked.
“No one is going to know,” McDaniel responded.
The next morning, Women’s Wear Daily ran the headline “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Under it there were two pictures: Kim Basinger in a freakish self-designed one-sleeve white number, and luminous Pfeiffer in her understated, utterly tasteful Armani.
She wasn’t the only one. Armani also dressed Best Actress winner Jessica Tandy, Best Supporting Actress nominee Lena Olin, Best Actor nominees Dan Aykroyd and Tom Cruise, Best Supporting Actor winner Denzel Washington, Steve Martin, Jeff Goldblum, Dennis Hopper, and the ceremony’s host Billy Crystal. “We were the only people calling,” McDaniel remembers. “We were the only game in town.”
Women’s Wear Daily dubbed the event the “Armani Awards.” Vogue’s Anna Wintour declared it “a revolution…the end of that glitzy, over-the-top, rather vulgar way of dressing. Armani gave movie stars a modern way to look.” More important, it gave Americans a glamour they could actually imagine wearing. Sales for Armani soared: between 1990 and 1993, worldwide turnover doubled to $442 million, much of the surge coming from the United States. Jennifer Meyer, Ralph Lauren’s West Coast liaison at the time, said, “[McDaniel] single-handedly changed the paradigm.”
THE MESSAGE WAS CLEAR: dressing celebrities for the red carpet was the best, and cheapest, advertising a luxury business could do. The following year “everybody tried to hire me,” McDaniel says with a laugh. “Valentino tried to get me. I met Gianni Versace in a cabana here at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hiding out. He said, ‘You are working for Armani, come work for me!’” She turned them all down and kept wrangling celebrities for Armani. Calvin Klein began staging an exclusive West Coast salon at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel twice a year where a select group of celebrities—including Meg Ryan, Anjelica Huston, and Goldie Hawn—could pick up his frocks at discount prices. Houses started luring stars to sit in the front row of their fashion shows in Paris and Milan by offering them and their loved ones free trips, hotel accommodations, and clothes. All the stars had to do was smile for the paparazzi for a couple of minutes and attend a champagne-infused postshow dinner or party. This way, the houses had a good relationship with the stars when it came time to dress them for the Oscars or the Golden Globes or some other big red-carpet event.
The sales impact was enormous. When Madonna wore a sapphire satin shirt and black velvet hipsters from Gucci to the MTV awards in 1995, sales exploded: within days there were waiting lists for the pants in Gucci stores worldwide. After the world’s top celebrity, Princess Diana, was photographed in 1995 carrying a Dior handbag—dubbed the Lady Dior in her honor—the company sold a hundred thousand at $1,000 apiece, single-handedly raising Dior’s 1996 annual revenues by 20 percent. Magazines devoted to celebrity style sprouted, beginning with In Style in August 1993. The goal of In Style, founding editor Martha Nelson told me, was to show that “style was accessible. Readers feel that they ‘know’ the celebrities in a way that they’ll never know models. There’s glamour there but not a distant glamour. Celebrities are in TV, movies, and pop music. They are in people’s lives and in people’s living rooms. They are not that mysterious.” 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,” Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, explained to me.
The Academy Awards ceremony is by far the biggest celebrity event and the most important for luxury brands. “Hundreds of millions of people watch the Oscars, all over the world,” Lisa Schiek, former director of communications for Gucci Group, told me. “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, it’s validation and you’ve got the world. The magnitude is awesome.” Indeed, Dana Telsey, former luxury goods analyst of Bear Stearns in New York, declared: “The highly anticipated red-carpet arrivals [are] arguably the most important moment for fashion and jewelry designers.” Carol Brodie, who was working for jeweler Harry Winston when I met with her during Oscar week 2005, told me that if a celebrity is photographed on the red carpet of the Academy Awards wearing your product, “You’ll get a hit once a month” for years. “Harry Winston’s advertising budget in the U.S. is slightly over a million a year,” she said. “But if you ask nine out of ten people in this country about Harry Winston, they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, they are the jeweler who dresses the stars.’ Dressing celebrities is an overwhelming way to gain awareness. Uma Thurman put Prada on the map. Charlize Theron put Vera Wang on the map. Halle Berry made Elie Saab. Americans spend billions of dollars on luxury brands because celebrities wear them.”
Though it was quickly becoming “a crowded field,” as McDaniel recalls, dressing stars still remained an intimate affair, like it was back in those studio wardrobe-department day
s. “The celebrities would come in directly to see us,” McDaniel said. They’d have tea and chat in the third-floor VIP lounge as they tried on the latest evening wear, then afterward maybe go down to the store and do a little shopping. It was a friendly business arrangement, a personal service.
“Then suddenly,” McDaniel remembers, “somebody else came in for them.”
STYLISTS ARE A RELATIVELY new phenomenon in fashion. Originally, stylists worked as fashion editors, dressing—or “styling”—models for fashion shoots for magazines and catalogs. But as the number of formal affairs exploded in the 1990s, from the Oscars and a few premieres to an avalanche of paparazzi-lined red-carpet events, stylists saw the birth of a new niche: dressing celebrities. Stylists went freelance and started signing up movie, television, and music stars. A stylist’s job, as Rachel Zoe explains, is to do “everything”: shopping, putting outfits together, dressing the star, creating a coherent look that reflects what the star’s image is, or what he or she wants their image to be, in the public mind. 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 or if it is nice out. “No matter how beautiful actresses are, they don’t know how to dress,” says Kelly Cutrone, founder of the fashion public relations 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 became fashion stars themselves. Jessica Paster made her name at the Oscars in 1998 when she dressed two Best Supporting Actress nominees: 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. When Basinger won for her role in L.A. Confidential, Escada’s—and Paster’s—profile soared. Since then, Paster has dressed Cate Blanchett, Uma Thurman, Naomi Watts, Joan Allen, and Kate Beckinsale. L’Wren Scott, the six-feet-four raven-haired girlfriend of Mick Jagger, is a former model who started her styling career doing photo shoots for Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts. Scott’s signature style is sophisticated and very haute couture—more aspiration than accessible. Her premier client is Nicole Kidman, but she has also dressed Marisa Tomei and Sarah Jessica Parker. Phillip Bloch, a former model turned fashion stylist, famously dressed Halle Berry for the 2002 Oscars in a sheer burgundy gown with sarong-like 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. Bloch wrote a book called Elements of Style: From the Portfolio of Hollywood’s Premier Stylist, became a spokesman for Lycra and Visa, and in 2007 was launching a luxury shoe and a middle-market lifestyle collection that he described as “Hollywood glamour for the masses.”
Rachel Zoe was perhaps the hottest stylist in the business when I met her at the Jimmy Choo Oscar salon in 2005. Her client list read like Page Six of the New York Post: along with Salma Hayek and Julie Delpy, she handled Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton, and Jessica Simpson. Some have great style and simply needed help putting everything together. Others need a complete workup: 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 going to dinner,” Zoe explained. “They get photographed going to lunch. They get photographed from the minute they leave their houses in the morning till the minute they go to sleep.” As New York designer Michael Kors noted, “We’ve never lived in such a paparazzi moment. So many women get their fashion information by looking at a tabloid, and [Rachel] has found a way of making those girls look intriguing and fabulous when they’re running out for a Starbucks.” By the summer of 2006, Zoe had become so influential that you could see references to her trademark look on luxury brand runways. And her fans are legion. At the Armani couture show in Paris, one girl standing behind me gasped, “There’s Rachel Zoe!” when Zoe dashed in at the last minute. “She’s the best stylist in Hollywood today!” At some shows, Zoe has been asked for an autograph.
Rachel Zoe Rosenzweig—her agent convinced her to lose the complicated last name in 1997—was born in New York in 1971 to an engineer and his Berkeley-grad wife and raised in Short Hills, New Jersey, the younger of two daughters. Early on, Zoe realized she had champagne tastes. “I was reading Vogue at thirteen and was always attracted to luxury,” she says. “My father always said he could drop me in a five-and-dime and I could find the one thing that was a dollar.” During a family vacation to Paris when she was thirteen, Zoe took her savings and bought a messenger-style monogram satchel at Louis Vuitton. She still has it, and keeps it in a closet with her several hundred other Vuitton bags. She studied sociology and psychology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and worked as a hostess at the Mona Lisa restaurant in Georgetown, where she met a dashing waiter named Rodger Berman and fell in love. They married in 1998. He worked for a few years as an investment banker. Now he is now president of Recognition Media, a company that owns awards shows, such as the Webby Awards for excellence on the Internet. After Zoe finished her undergraduate studies, she thought about pursuing postgraduate work to become a psychiatrist but opted instead to look for a job. A friend of a friend told her about an opening as a fashion assistant at YM magazine. She thought, “Why not?” and got it: three days a week at $75 a day. Within three years, she was YM’s senior fashion editor. “I loved it so much, I decided to do it the rest of my life,” she says. In 1997, she went freelance, styling for fashion magazines. Often her subjects were celebrities and on occasion they asked if she could help them dress for red-carpet appearances. Soon Zoe had a host of private clients, including the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and Enrique Iglesias.
Zoe’s trademark style—for herself as well as her clients—is Saturday Night Fever meets early Cher: for day, skinny cropped jeans, little fitted jackets, reptile-skin stilettos, and gobs of chains; for night, clingy goddess gowns. Her favorite designers are Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, Christian Lacroix, John Galliano, Marc Jacobs, and Tom Ford. “If I ever got a tattoo it would be ‘Tom Ford Lives Forever,’” she gushed to Harper’s Bazaar in 2005. She also collects and uses a lot of vintage clothing, particularly from Halston, Pucci, and Yves Saint Laurent. Zoe has even reached into her personal wardrobe of free clothes to dress her “girls” Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, and Jessica Simpson, prompting the fashion press to dub them “Zoe Clones.”
She’s parlayed her styling into other gigs, including contributing regularly to Cosmopolitan, appearing on Oprah, and designing a capsule collection of handbags for Judith Leiber. She is so famous for her taste that now she gets requests from the rich and unfamous to help them, too. “People come in to L.A. for three days and want to pay me $20,000 a day to take them shopping,” she says incredulously. “I have someone who wants to fly me to Paris to take their daughter shopping.” She also consults for various luxury designers for red-carpet appearances, giving them design suggestions. “The designers don’t have time to know their clients—they’re too busy with their collections,” Zoe explains. “And the media pressure is immense. That’s why I have my job, because the media feels there is a sense of power and influence of style. Clients come to me now—or their agents and publicists—and say, ‘Help! Help! Help!’” In March 2007, she joined the advisory board and signed on as the creative consultant for Halston, the legendary 1970s American fashion brand that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein had just purchased.
While Zoe is constantly busy dressing her clients, Oscar season is “colossal mayhem,” she says with a laugh. “You can forget sleeping between January and March. A million fit
tings, gathering accessories. Me and my two assistants drinking coffee at midnight. I get three hundred phone calls and two hundred e-mails a day.” She has one primary rule: “There should never be more than two dresses from the same house on the red carpet.” To avoid this, Zoe normally asks for exclusivity from a brand. “It protects the brand from overexposure,” she said, “and most importantly, it protects my client.” In 2006, Zoe had Jennifer Garner, who was presenting; Keira Knightley, who was nominated for Best Actress; and six clients attending the Vanity Fair party who needed to be as glamorous as the movie stars. On Oscar day, Zoe personally helped dress her highest-profile client, Knightley, in a Vera Wang one-shouldered burgundy taffeta gown, while her assistants were dispatched to attend to her other clients. “You need to have someone on hand in case of a fashion emergency, like a broken zipper or a popped button,” Zoe explained.
Luxury brands go extraordinary lengths to get their products on those red-carpet arrivals. They send unsolicited packages of goodies—known as “swag” in the biz—to celebrities year-round, usually via their publicists. “That’s what I’m here for—to handle the avalanche,” Troy Nankin—publicist for such stars as Hilary Swank, Angie Harmon, and Selma Blair—told me. “I send it to the mom or to a charity. Escada sent these purses around before Christmas, and then US Weekly runs a photo of Selma Blair with a caption that reads ‘Selma Blair loves her new Escada bag.’ No, Selma Blair’s maid loves her new bag.” The Oscars traditionally have been the ultimate swagfests. Presenters received gigantic baskets of freebies—including exotic trips, luxury watches, and camcorders—that were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Academy until the IRS came down on them. The Academy voted to discontinue the practice as of 2007. Luxury brands, on their own, swag nominees and presenters too. In 2005, the London-based leather goods company Anya Hindmarch, for example, gave each Best Actress and Supporting Actress nominee a Bespoke Ebury chocolate leather tote embossed with a personal message from their director or co-star and stuffed with Revlon products.