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It would be impossible to deconstruct fashion designers’ enchantment with the latest minted icon, the Park Avenue Princess,christian boots, without dwelling for a moment on the utter disenchantment with the last iconic figure championed: the movie starlet.
No sooner had designers canonized the indie goddesses (and Oscar nominees) Gwyneth Paltrow, Julianne Moore, Chlo Sevigny and Kristin Scott Thomas than those icons began shilling away in fashion ads. How can a starlet be your muse when she’s selling someone else’s clutch? Icons are by definition untouchable; how can a star be untouchable and bought?
Then, a new kind of bribery began to emerge: designers paying celebrity stylists outright to get the stars into their clothes. Celebrities-cum-handbag peddlers began looking less like muses and more like hired help. There are, after all, only so many products a celebrity can push before her endorsement loses its clout.
What a waste of celebrity, the most powerful currency in existence today. Imagine — to borrow a word from John Lennon — if that currency were being used to stop racism, or cancer, or wars, or even the worship of false idols, instead of using it to sell handbags, wristwatches, and cheap T-shirts. (Not to mention magazines on the newsstand.)
Time and again, those designers who declared Park Avenue women to be their inspiration cited grim West Coast style as their reason for expunging starlets from their dreamscape. And the big selling point for the Park Avenue Princess is that, unlike her West Coast counterpart, she picks out her own clothes.
"I think at a certain point it’s sort of, oh, my God, I can’t look at another person who went to a stylist and did themselves up," says Michael Kors, who championed Park Avenue as fashion’s new ground zero in his New York collection. "There’s a backlash even in L.A," he continues. "Now even a starlet wants to look like she lives the life, even if she just landed in her cash." He calls it the 50’s meets the 80’s — because the new Park Avenue Princesses are groomed and dressed like kept wives, but they work for a living.
Some of the Princesses have let it be known that they feel that the visions they’ve inspired on the runway are caricatures at best. But fashion relies on more stereotypes than a stand-up comic in the Catskills. The gold lame coats, the pieced geometric furs, the exploded herringbones with fur collars — it’s a fantasy of Park Avenue life, the same way that satin gowns and diamonds are a fantasy of a starlet’s regular evening out.