by Dana Thomas
Perhaps the most visible effort luxury brands make to dress celebrities for the Oscars is to set up salons at the finest addresses around town, such as the Jimmy Choo Oscar Suite at the Peninsula. They invite A-list and B-list celebrities, publicists, agents, and stylists such as Zoe to come by for lunch, tea, or drinks to check out their latest, most fabulous wares—all available to “borrow” for the red carpet. For small companies like Jimmy Choo, an Oscar salon is a bonanza of publicity. “When you put a pair of glamorous shoes on a stunning actress about to receive an award, well, you can’t beat that,” says Jimmy Choo creative director Sandra Choi. “Everybody who watches the show, or reads about it, knows we took part. Everything we have here is in the store and they can come in and buy a piece of that glamour.” Most of the time, as Choi points out, no one can see the Choos underneath the long gowns. But every chance an actress gets, she’ll mention to a television commentator or reporter that she’s wearing Choos and give a little flash of ankle to prove it. She’ll also say who loaned (or gave) her the dress, jewels, and handbag. The morning after a red-carpet event, Choo, like all the other major luxury brands that dress stars, e-mails a press release to reporters around the globe that details who wore which Choo shoes, often with a red-carpet photo attached. Says Choi: “The mileage for the rest of the year is phenomenal.”
The impact on the public is profound. According to a study conducted by Cotton Incorporated in 2004, 27 percent of female shoppers ages twenty to twenty-four said they got clothing ideas from watching celebrities, up from 15 percent in 1994. In the twenty-five to thirty-four bracket, it jumped from 10 percent in 1994 to 18 percent in 2004. For women ages thirty-five to forty-four, it was 14 percent, up from 8 percent in 1994.
In February 2005, I decided to see the salonfest firsthand. I checked into the Chateau Marmont, a favorite old Hollywood hotel for movie and fashion sorts, got in contact with luxury brand and product placement publicists, and the invitations rolled in. Right there at the Chateau, in one of the Craig Ellwood–designed 1950s bungalows in the garden, French designer Roland Mouret showed his recent couture collection to stylists and their celebrities. He wound up dressing Cate Blanchett and Selma Blair for events during the week, and Scarlett Johansson for the Oscars ceremony. In the 1920s clapboard Bungalow 1 overlooking the pool, the estate jewelry company Sell Jewelry hosted a ladies’ luncheon for stylists, socialites, and fashion editors to try on vintage rings and brooches. At the Kwiat diamonds cocktail party at The Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, guests sipped “diamond-tinis”—turquoise-hued martinis sprinkled with gold dust. W magazine hosted an invitation-only “Hollywood Retreat,” in a mod Hollywood Hills home, where high-as well as low-wattage stars pawed through and borrowed Rena Lange clothes, Penny Preville jewels, and Jaeger-LeCoultre watches. In the back bedroom, celebrity hairdresser Chris McMillan tended to their tresses; when I was there, Paula Abdul was in his chair getting the works. Afterward, I was invited to join guests by the pool for a light “spa” lunch by top L.A. restaurant Patina.
Over on Rodeo Drive, Chanel offered free professional makeup sessions to regular and celebrity clients at the Frédéric Fekkai Salon and Harry Winston received customers and stylists in its jewel-box salon, with butlers serving martinis. In 2003, Harry Winston provided more than $40 million worth of diamonds for the Oscars, including a $3.5 million necklace for Queen Latifah. Up the street, Caroline Gruosi-Scheufele, co-president of the Swiss jeweler Chopard, and her staff dispatched a heart-shaped diamond-studded pendant as a gift to Elizabeth Taylor, who would be the guest of honor at the post-Oscars Elton John AIDS Foundation benefit, which Chopard co-sponsored. Sir Elton and his partner, David Furnish, had Chopard diamond watches on their wrists at the gala, which the Los Angeles Times duly noted in its Oscar party wrap-up.
Swarovski, the one-hundred-year-old Austrian cut-crystal company, took over garden suite number 102 at the exclusive Raffles L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills, one of a dozen luxury brand salons at the hotel. Swarovski has provided crystals for the film industry since the Golden Age, when it helped create the sparkling ruby red shoes that Dorothy wore down the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz. Today, Nadja Swarovski, the company’s vice president of international communications and the great-granddaughter the founder, has unabashedly pursued the Hollywood angle. In 2000, she joined the luxury onslaught during Oscar week, booking the roomy fourteen-hundred-square-foot L’Ermitage garden suite, which goes for $2,000 a night during Oscar week. She had the company ship hundreds of handbags to L.A. and sent her top staff to get those bags in the hands of movie stars.
“We have shifted from the supermodel to the celebrity,” Nadja told me over tea in the suite one morning. “Celebrities make it more realistic.”
The large plush beige-on-beige living room was filled with long tables cluttered with evening bags: clutches covered with shimmering silver, gold, or black crystals; little handbags made of dusty rose or bronze crystal beads; plain silk clutches that could be dressed up with 1940s crystal brooches. “Americans have special needs,” François Ortarix, Swarovski’s international PR head, said as he showed me the collection. “Most want clutches, small, black, silver or gold. They don’t want to take any risk. At the Cannes Film Festival you see crazy things on the red carpet. Here, it’s traditional and conventional. There are so many critics reviewing what you wear, you aren’t allowed to make any mistakes on the Oscar red carpet. You have to be perfect, and in a way that people want you to be, not as you are.”
Over in the corner on the floor sat a pile of clutches, in gold, silver and black, ordered up by Jessica Paster. Swarovski sent Rachel Zoe a selection, but she dropped by without an appointment to see what else they had to offer and left with a few more. Nothing in the salon was for sale. “We are here to create a dream,” Ortarix told me. “We don’t want to put a price on it.”
THE POWER and the money involved in dressing celebrities in luxury brands has brought out a frightening ruthlessness among stylists. Some have been known to hoard the best looks, or an entire collection, until the night before an event so that no one else can see them, much less use them. Some ask their celebrity clients to reimburse purchases of luxury goods that were actually gifts from the houses, or neglect to tell their clients about the gifts, then resell them and pocket the cash. One prominent stylist who dressed Pink, Mary J. Blige, and P. Diddy, was reportedly convicted of defrauding eight New York jewelers of more than $1.5 million and sentenced to eighteen months to three years in prison. He allegedly sold the jewels to maintain his flamboyant lifestyle.
Stylists have a lot of leverage. Some have asked luxury brands for cash payments, mortgage payments, exotic vacations. “Seventy percent of them make it clear: ‘I think I could make it happen.’ And they are waiting for you to say, ‘If you make this happen I’ll take care of you, and I’ll hook the celebrity up,’” says Kelly Cutrone of People’s Revolution. “About 25 to 30 percent say, ‘Yes I can make this happen, but what’s in it for us? Money, clothes, trips, first-class travel, the Ritz in Paris? What’s the business of this?’” One stylist reportedly demanded that a designer pay for her liposuction. The designer did, and the stylist’s client was wearing the designer’s dress when she picked up her Best Actress Oscar. Harry Winston’s Carol Brodie remembers another story—“which I know is true,” she says—about a stylist who demanded that a designer furnish her home. The designer agreed, the actress wore the dress, and the world’s fashion press declared her the best-dressed star on the red carpet. “It’s their lethal poker hand: ‘I need a vacation and can I use your private villa and your private jet and can you pay for my liposuction?’” Cutrone says. “And you have to ante up.”
Says Zoe, “I have never taken a bribe or been paid to use a brand on the red carpet. But I’ve been offered trips all over the world, gifts, cash, anything and everything.”
And some stylists have been known simply to be caustic. For the Golden Globes in 2000, Jessica Paster wanted to dress her big
client Hilary Swank in a gown by Randolph Duke. The publicist for Randolph Duke at the time remembers, “Jessica had heard we were dressing Charlize Theron in the same dress as Hilary, which was not true. At five a.m., I got this phone call. ‘I will not be fooled!’ Screeching. The most insane sound I had ever heard. I held the phone from my ear, and she said, ‘I will ruin you! You will never work with any of my clients again!!!’ So they dropped that dress and put Hilary in Versace.”
When I asked Rachel Zoe about such bad behavior, she sighed. “Stylists in general are really vindictive and greedy,” she said, “and I get really frustrated with this petty high school bullshit that goes on.”
Traditionally, none of that effort or graft guaranteed that the star would actually wear what the brand had sent via the stylist to the celebrity. Luxury brands’ Hollywood point-people would get confirmation the afternoon of the event, then see the celebrity show up with something else on that evening. “For the Golden Globes [in 2005] I sent over a collection of watches, cufflinks, and studs chosen by an A-A-A-list star,” says Harry Winston’s Carol Brodie. “And I loaned to his girlfriend and his manager and his manager’s wife, which I never do, but I knew he was going to be the most visible person on the carpet. And I looked at the wires the next day, and he wasn’t wearing it. I called the stylist and said, ‘What was that about? Why did you waste my time?’ And the stylist told me, ‘He was all set to wear it, but he got a tray full of watches in front of him and every single one was free for him if he wore it.’”
Eventually, flacks started getting confirmation from the celebrity’s publicist in the limo on the way to the event. And sometimes even that didn’t mean anything. “One year I had Chloe Sevigny sorted out with Bulgari and had her going in the car with it on,” remembers Cutrone, who at the time worked for Bulgari in Beverly Hills. “And when she got out of the car, she was wearing a cross by Asprey-Girard.” Finally, brands started drawing up contracts stipulating that the star would wear their wares at a particular event, on press tours, or for a year. One group did even better: a few years ago, it quietly signed a contract with a top stylist stipulating that she would dress her clients exclusively in that group’s clothes. Sure enough, her A-list stars began to wear clothes from that group’s brands almost exclusively to premieres and gala events—one actress even wore the group’s clothes to her wedding. The stylist made out, too, getting paid on both ends.
Then, a few years ago, the power quietly shifted away from the stylists and to the celebrities. It started, says Cutrone, with the celebrities asking if they could keep the clothes, shoes, jewelry, and so on: “[Then] it was, ‘What else are you going to give me?’ Then, ‘Give me a $10,000 gift certificate.’ And then it was, ‘I want bank’—$100,000, $200,000, even $250,000. And the queens of the bank game are the nominees and presenters at the Oscars.”
Celebrity agents at William Morris, CAA, ICM, and others negotiate the contracts, and the luxury brands state their requirements. A brooch must be visible in an above-the-waist shot. Earrings have to be visible, so hair has to be up. The celebrity must say the brand’s name two to four times on a national television channel. When asked to talk about his or her look, the celebrity must refer to the brand in an audible and clear manner. “I thought it was amazing to put their star’s name on an e-mail,” says Armani’s Wanda McDaniel, of agents shopping their clients for luxury brand deals. “But [the agents] are clear that it is an interesting component for a star’s career. It’s part of the star’s branding.”
Without much coercing, I heard several stories of actors or actresses getting paid to wear luxury brand goods to the Oscars and Golden Globes. The most famous was when Charlize Theron and Hilary Swank reportedly decided at the last minute to replace the loaned Harry Winston jewels they were to wear to the Golden Globes in 2005 with dangling earrings and six-figure checks from Chopard, but said nothing publicly about it. Other celebrities and Hollywood insiders have revealed that Chopard regularly offered “a boatload of money,” as one put it, to wear Chopard jewels. Chopard’s U.S. spokeswoman Stephanie Labeille told the Los Angeles Times that the house did not have formal contracts with the stars but that the company had used money as an incentive in the past. However, Chopard seems to be having a hard time with its official position regarding celebrity remuneration: two days after the Los Angeles Times piece, in a conversation with me, Labeille denied that the company paid stars to wear its jewelry.
“If you are a contractor, and you hire one company over another because they paid you, it’s called bribery—that’s illegal in the United States,” says Carol Brodie. “So if you are a celebrity and somebody is paying you to wear their goods and you choose it because they are bribing you, is that illegal? It’s a tough ethical question. I think it’s all fine as long as you don’t deceive the public and fess up that you are under contract with the company to wear their goods. I think in a few years each brand will have a face associated with it, something where some money has been exchanged to use the likeness of a celebrity, and the stars will wear the brand from shoes to hats. Celebrity dressing will purely be product placement, openly and outwardly.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
“A woman enveloped in luxury has a special radiance.”
—COCO CHANEL
NESTLED IN THE HILLS near the town of Grasse, in the south of France, is a peaceful valley divided by a single winding country road. Along one side runs a small gentle river called the Saigne. Along the other are flat fields of rose and jasmine bushes. The farm, known as Le Petit Campadieu (The Little Camp of God), is run by Joseph Mul, a fifth-generation farmer in Grasse. Mul tends to one hundred hectares of flowers, five hectares of which are Centifolia roses and another five jasmine. Mul and his family have farmed this land exclusively for Chanel since 1986. Each May, he harvests fifty tons of Centifolia roses, and each September, twenty-five tons of jasmine. In the hills surrounding the valley there are several hectares of mimosa, which he distills for other perfume companies. Le Petit Campadieu is one of the last major flower farms in Grasse.
Monsieur Mul is a jolly French paysan, the sort that Doisneau photographed back in the 1950s, with a round, red-cheeked face, twinkling clear gray eyes, and a broad, deep smile. He dresses usually in a polo shirt, work trousers cinched up under his belly, worn dark brown sneakers, and atop his slightly balding pate, a classic casquette. He shakes your hand firmly, his thick fingers as rough as old cracked leather. When he talks, it’s in that distinct southern twang known as an accent du Midi. Pain (bread), normally pronounced pahn, comes out payng. Same with vin (wine): vehn is veyng.
The Mul family started out in the region in the nineteenth century growing hay. At the time, Grasse was a center for production of leather gloves. Leather back then had a vile smell, so tanneries treated it with animal fat infused with flowers. The demand for flowers increased in the region, and the Muls replaced their hay with roses and jasmine. From there, the Grasse perfume industry grew. The belle epoque for flowers in Grasse, Mul explained as he drove me in his navy Jeep Grand Cherokee to the rose fields on a dewy May morning, was from 1920 to 1950. “That was the generation that flourished,” he says. “It was really a boom.” But in the 1950s, labor prices began to rise in France, and the flower business, which relies on manual labor, first moved to southern Italy and Morocco, then later to Egypt. Now flowers are grown in such cheap labor markets as Turkey, India, China, and since the fall of the Berlin wall, the Balkans.
For the perfume Coco, Chanel uses another sweet, soft-smelling rose called Damascena, which is cultivated in Turkey and Bulgaria. Bulgaria’s Damascena roses sell for $1 a kilo, six times less than Grasse’s Centifolia. To comprehend what all this international sourcing has done to the French flower industry, consider this: In the 1920s, Grasse produced thirty tons of jasmine absolute, the rich oil that is extracted from the flower. Today, it produces about sixty-five pounds. Grasse has become like the haute couture ateliers in Paris: a boutiq
ue business kept alive by the generosity of those who understand, appreciate, and can afford the best that money can buy.
Chanel is Grasse’s most important patron. It purchases all of Joseph Mul’s jasmine and 40 percent of his roses. The remaining 60 percent is sold to laboratories that create perfumes, primarily International Flavors & Fragrances. The Centifolia annual production is small: 150 kilos of concrete, the waxy substance that contains the flower’s absolute. Centifolia concrete from Grasse sells for three times more than Moroccan rose concrete. Chanel is “one of the only old perfumes that hasn’t changed,” Mul said. “As long as No. 5 exists, we’ll be here.”
We arrive at the fields at about ten in the morning, the moment when the rose blossoms open. It is warm, with a soft refreshing wind. “Sea breezes,” Mul tells me as we walk down the rows of bushes. The variety of Centifolia that Mul grows is known as the rose de mai, or May rose, because it blooms only once a year, for about five weeks in May and early June. The aroma is overwhelming and very particular: the Centifolia is a fragrant rose, but not like the sweet pleasing ones in your garden. It is a far more voluptuous and serious scent, with an acrid edge to it. About forty workers, most dark-skinned and many speaking Arabic, move down the rows, quickly snapping the roses’ heads off and slipping them gently in pouches slung over their torsos. When the pouches are full, they are emptied into big burlap sacks, which are loaded onto a flatbed trailer pulled by a tractor to the extraction factory, a one-hundred-by-fifty-foot, two-story warehouse-like building at the edge of the fields. For most of the twentieth century, the Mul family only farmed flowers and sent them elsewhere in Grasse for extraction. In 1986, when Joseph Mul secured the Chanel contract, he built an extracting plant on his farm “because,” says he frankly, “Grasse was dying out.”