Kirkus Reviews QR Code
HIJACKING THE RUNWAY by Teri Agins

HIJACKING THE RUNWAY

How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers

by Teri Agins

Pub Date: Oct. 9th, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59240-814-6
Publisher: Gotham Books

Splashy critique of the celebrity sway over fashion.

After scrutinizing the encroachment of casual wear into the house of haute couture in her debut (The End of Fashion, 1999), seasoned Wall Street Journal fashion journalist Agins chronicles another seminal change: the onslaught of megastar-inspired product lines diluting the industry’s reputation for sartorial glitz and glamour. The author reaches back to past decades when luminaries like Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor and others cashed in on fame and “the allure of celebrity,” plugging their self-branded clothing lines, perfumes and jewelry. Fully utilizing her fashion week backstage-pass privileges, Agins provides a laundry list of saleable, self-possessed celebrity-wear, from such stars as Sean Combs, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga—all best-sellers with their star power leveraged to showboat the products as must-have indulgence items. In just one of the numerous interviews from which Agins cleverly draws opinion and material, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour surprisingly voices the benefits of this celebrity influence. While the author doesn’t challenge the reality of someone famous increasing the revenue of a product or service just by affixing his or her name to it, she zeroes in on the ramifications of that type of affiliation. Not one to kowtow to the mesmerizing zeal of the celebrity brand, Agins’ assessments are razor-sharp and brutally honest when it comes to their blunders. She is hilariously critical of the vacuous Kardashian family and their groupies’ “souvenir shop” Dash; she then cringes at a heavily marked-down “klearance” rack of their untouched, whisper-thin duds at Sears. Though the narrative is padded with pages of floridly detailed, biographical filler, Agins is masterful at fashion speculation and engagingly weighs both the positives and negatives of an industry in which “the lines between celebrity and fashion designer have become blurred.”

A breezy, authoritative report on the formidable culture of “[c]elebrities as billboards for fashion.”