By the turn of the millennium, celebrities had largely replaced models on Vogue covers, which was a reflection of the overall integration of fashion with entertainment. In this episode of In Vogue: The 2000s, we explore how fashion went (back to) Hollywood.
Listen to the seventh episode of the In Vogue: The 2000s podcast now.
During the golden age of the movies actresses were dressed by costume designers and their on-screen looks set trends; a notable example is the raffles-sleeve “Letty Lynton” dress Adrian created for Joan Crawford. The romance between fashion and film in the 1930s cooled in the years after. And before long the creative industries were siloed. “When I grew up, there was a distinct line between fashion, film, music, high art, like opera, theater—they just didn’t mix,” says director Baz Luhrmann. “And if you were hanging around fashion, you were kinda considered shallow. You couldn’t be, you know, a substantial filmmaker if you cared about fashion. That line disappeared in the early 2000s.”
At Vogue the walls fell quickly. The cover of the December 2000 issue featured Nicole Kidman as Satine, the character she played in the Academy Award-winning Luhrmann film Moulin Rouge! And the celebrity covers kept (and keep) coming as they reach a wide and engaged audience with whom readers relate in a different way than with models. Celebrities, notes editor Mark Holgate, “gave you a different narrative about fashion. One that was connected to shared experience,” like watching a movie or singing along to a song.
Actors and musicians who had started infiltrating the front rows of fashion shows in the 1990s, were now tracked by paparazzi not only at premieres but on coffee runs, and these images found homes in the tabloids. Those publications, says celebrity stylist Kate Young, “were like pre-Instagram. ” Suddenly, “you could see what [celebrities] were wearing all the time. And people cared. We all cared. It was like the way Instagram is now. You know, it felt like access.”
The growth of media, and the beginning of the digital age, created a sort of cultural salad. “The job of a magazine like Vogue is to contextualize fashion in the real world or some version of the real world,” says editor Mark Guiducci. “And what Anna [Wintour] saw was that by putting fashion on people other than just models, whether it be Madonna or Gwyneth Paltrow, or First Lady Hillary Clinton, she brought in new audiences and invited people into a conversation that they had never been invited to before. And in doing so, she brought new customers to the designers.”
That celebrity endorsement could be measured in terms of the bottom line, creating a cultural shift, suggests stylist Rachel Zoe. “At that time there was this huge shift in the conversion into sales, and I think that was probably the big switch, the big change,” she says. “I think it started to really become a business of fashion.” Stylists became a new elite in this new model, and in constructing the public images of celebrities they often approached celebrity status themselves. Zoe, for one, had her own television series, and its success, notes editor Hamish Bowles, “was a signal that fashion had become undeniably mainstream. It was no longer constrained to fashion industry insiders—it had permeated pop culture.”
In Vogue: The 2000s is presented by Anna Wintour, and produced by Vogue. Episode 7, “Hollywood: Fashion Steps Into Frame,” features interviews with, in order of appearance, Baz Luhrmann, Sienna Miller, Kate Mulleavy, Nicola Formichetti, Kate Young, Rachel Zoe, and Laura Mulleavy. Vogue’s editorial team is Mark Guiducci, Mark Holgate, Nicole Phelps, Ivan Shaw, and Laird Borrelli-Persson. Hosted by Hamish Bowles.
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