Celeb cause

Milan Borich and Kate Elliott at the Stolen Girlfriends Club show at Fashion Week 2008. Photo / Norrie Montgomery

It's dreadfully exciting that Pamela Anderson will be gracing us with her presence at our very own Fashion Week this year. After all, the former Baywatch star will be presenting her own range of eco-conscious and animal-friendly beachwear. She has recently featured in Vivienne Westwood campaigns and is, just quietly, known as a bit of a muse to the artists Richard Prince, David LaChapelle and Jeff Koons.

And where else would she want to show off her range but in Auckland? Seriously. Inquisitive minds do actually want to know. The pneumatic blonde's visit raises a few other interesting questions, mainly to do with the fashion industry and the nature of celebrity. Such as:

Why is the fashion industry so hung up on celebrity? Well, there can be no doubt that having the well known wear your clothes can be a handy thing. A little bit of that glamour, notoriety or street cred the celebrity enjoys rubs off on the fashion label. As Douglas Kellner, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, writes, "celebrity can now shape identity". Whereas the clothes you wear have always done so. Which is why it's a beneficial partnership. It's also why celebrity smiles replaced unknown models on the magazine covers a few years back.

How do celebrities get the clothes? When our collective obsession with the genus "homo celebritus" began there were some breathless, overexcitable folk who felt thrilled that anyone - please, please, anyone at all! - climbed into their clothes and paraded around. But ever since celebrities took over from supermodels, the way fashion and celebrity interact has, in fact, been far more deliberate. It may have been happening overseas for a while but here there can be no doubt who started this off: Karen Walker.

Walker was probably the first local designer to send out a press release saying that an internationally famous person had worn her clothes. In her case, Madonna. It's not that it had not ever happened before. It's just that Walker, who was already taking a lot of her marketing cues from overseas, let the rest of New Zealand know.

Isn't that a bit lame? Who cares if a celebrity wears your clothes? That thought did run through a lot of heads. In fact, it took other local designers a bit longer to come around to the idea. After all, there was something a wee bit un-New Zealand about it. You were basically asking to have your tall poppies run over by a lawnmower if you went on about the fancy people who wore your frocks.

Still that wore off pretty quickly. Let's see. Probably, oh, about five minutes after Walker's label on Madonna's bottom made the evening news and Walker became bigger than most local rock stars.

And then all of a sudden everyone was doing it. At one stage fashion writers would receive several gushing press releases a day either informing them that a certain famous-for-being-well-known individual had worn that New Zealand label, or that some other actress or singer was associating themselves with some beauty or fashion product. And to be totally honest, it did get a bit tiresome.

Are the clothes free? Not in New Zealand, they're not. Overseas designers have been known to throw racks of clothes at celebrities to try to get them to wear just one thing out in public. In a country like America, having the right celebrity do this in front of the New Weekly photographer could equal thousands of sales right around the country. Ker-ching! Which made it worth giving all that gear away.

Things are obviously a little different here. Many young designers - and even many well established designers - cannot afford to simply give a frock away, let alone racks of stock. If they hand over this kind of loot to international celebrities, they cannot know where the clothes will end up, or if the famous person will ever be photographed in public wearing them. Anyway it's even less practical with local celebrities. If you saw the girl who plays the nurse on Shortland Street wearing a Trelise Cooper dress, would you run out and buy three? Exactly. The payback just isn't there.

So New Zealand designers choose their celebrity patrons much more carefully.

You haven't answered the question... Okay, so if you see the lead singer of a band wearing a designer dress at the music Petra Bagust and Peter Urlich at the Zambesi fashion show 2008.Milan Borich and Kate Elliot at Stolen Girlfriends Club in 2008.awards, one of three things will probably have happened. She has a relationship with the designer and has been to the designer's workroom, tried on some clothes, maybe even consulted with a stylist and then borrowed said outfit for the evening. She'll be returning it dry cleaned if she wants to keep her designer friend happy. Or she has bought the dress at a discount because the designer wants to see her in those clothes and has offered it to her at a lower price. Or, much more unusually, she has been given the dress by the designer. The latter really doesn't happen as much as you think it might.

Why do designers have celebrities in the front rows? And how do they choose them? Some of those well coiffed newsreaders, musicians and actors you see sitting in the front rows at New Zealand Fashion Week are the designer's loyal customers. They may (or may not) have borrowed a dress to wear to a gala one time or another. They may (or may not) own a lot of that label's clothes anyway. And they will have been invited because of this. Meanwhile, others are what may best be described as "paparazzi bait". That is, they don't necessarily shop regularly at that boutique but they are there to get the runway show more publicity than it would on its own.

Interestingly, in New Zealand a lot of the well-watched faces in the front rows really seem to suit the clothes that are being shown. As in, at Zambesi you will get black-clad film directors who have just flown in from Hollywood and various other elder stateswomen of local culture alongside a sartorial intelligentsia loyal to the 30-year-old label. At Kate Sylvester, the crowd tends to be a little rowdier, featuring younger television stars and a solid smattering of musicians. And at Trelise Cooper you'll see serious money in the front row, amid the high-ranking blonde newsreaders. And although, yes, there have been All Blacks in Zambesi's front rows in the past, generally - and unlike overseas shows where you may find such incongruous folks as tennis star Roger Federer sitting next to Vogue's Anna Wintour - you don't get a lot of paparazzi bait that seems seriously out of place.

What about celebrities who become designers? This is about taking all of the above one step further. Instead of just putting the celebrity's face on the posters, let's just put it straight on the clothes. While there are some well-known stars who have a unique style and every right to peddle it, it is also true that most of those so-called bold faced names haven't picked up a sewing needle in years. As it is, this sort of thing is fairly rare in New Zealand - the closest we get is Rachel Hunter with her swimwear and Dan Carter with his blokes' clothes.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently, however, that money spent on celebrity lines is decreasing. In the same story, musician and well-dressed man about town, Justin Timberlake was interviewed. His clothing line, William Rast, has been struggling to reach targets and as Timberlake told journalists, "being a celebrity gets your foot in the door, but once you are there, people go, 'OK, now what?' "

Aren't designers celebrities too? Yes, they are. Over the past few years there has been another twist to this tale of big names and ball gowns. It has a lot to do with the way in which the local media treats fashion. Runway shows are spectacles to be reviewed, whole reality television series are based around aspects of the business and fashion isn't just an industry any more - it's a lucrative form of entertainment.

When New York Fashion Week was sold to IMG - an international management agency that represents actors and sports stars and now also runs Australian Fashion Week - the European fashion industry was outraged, accusing the Americans of crass commercialism. How was creativity being nurtured now, where were the standards? But IMG clearly see runway shows as part of the entertainment spectrum, and fashion weeks as a spectator sport.

To a certain extent this has happened in New Zealand too. They are not up there with rugby balls yet but frocks have certainly had their moments - and like rugby players, our most successful fashion designers have themselves become celebrities.

And then there's the "personal brand." As in, you are what you sell. We all tweak our personal brands on Facebook, fashion designers simply make a business out of it. This decade, Karen Walker's face is known by many and she has extended her personal branding to all sorts of other merchandise, from house paints to cosmetics. Other designers - Trelise Cooper, Kate Sylvester and Cybele Wiren among them - are also climbing into the your-face-looks-familiar, where-do-I-know-you-from arena. Because in an era when advertising doesn't always have the desired effect, it's important to put your brand out there in other ways. Getting one's house in an interiors magazine, making the occasional, obligatory appearance in the social pages, writing about your holidays in the women's weeklies - it's all good marketing.

Do the designers like being celebrities? It is hard to say. Most of those who have been in the business for a while may have been reluctant at first but now almost all seem to consider it part of the job.

So here is a question for you lot to ponder: what effect does all of this have on the clothes? Does it make the design better or worse? Or just the business more profitable?

It is probably worth noting then, that emphasis on celebrity, and its public pulling power, does change things. Look at film festivals where the red carpet is more important than the movies being shown inside. Or the restaurant where the celebrity chef never actually cooks anything.

As Vanessa Friedman, the fashion editor of Financial Times, wrote recently in her coverage of New York Fashion Week, the night after the MTV music awards the American fashion industry was buzzing with gossip about Kanye West's invasion of the stage. Friedman reported that nobody could figure out if it was a publicity stunt or not. "The sheer fact that so many fashion people were willing to believe that the event was put on to influence opinion seemed significant," she noted in her online runway diary. "It's symptomatic of how designers often treat their shows," she concluded. "Gussying them up with other stuff that creates an extra frisson ... insurance in case the clothes aren't strong enough on their own."