[KhaoticKharma]

Part II

Lines by Gwen Stefani and Jennifer Lopez have taken in more than $200 million each. Jay-Z’s Rocawear wholesaled in the hundreds of millions before the company was sold to a clothing conglomerate for $204 million last year. Russell Simmons sold his Phat Farm to another company for $140 million, and he and ex-wife Kimora Lee stayed on as well-paid executives.
In the past celebrities leveraged their style-icon status by doing endorsements. Today they are showing their own collections on runways alongside pros. The Lauren Conrad Collection debuted in March at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Culver City. Conrad is the centerpiece of the hit reality soap The Hills, and her MTV employers funded the line, a first for the network. Whitney Port, another cast member of the show, sat in the front row, closely watching models walk down the runway in stretchy cotton jersey dresses. Port is introducing her own label later this year. Absent was Heidi Montag, who also appears on The Hills. Was it because she was feuding with Conrad, as the tabloids reported, or because she was busy with Heidiwood, her togs for Anchor Blue stores?
Released this year or planned for fall are lines by Heidi Klum, Rachel Bilson, Avril Lavigne, Luke Wilson, Chloë Sevigny, Mel B of the Spice Girls, Jenna Jameson, the Pussycat Dolls, and Laird Hamilton. Kimora Lee signed on to create Fabulosity for JC Penney, unconcerned that it will compete with her Baby Phat collection, a top seller at Macy’s. All this clothing will fight for shelf space with efforts brought forth last year by Justin Timberlake, Victoria Beckham, Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Venus
Williams, Reba McEntire, and Sienna Miller.
Television stars are smart to strike licensing deals. Daisy Fuentes, Alyssa Milano, and Delta Burke may never attain A-list status, but their low-priced clothing can earn them more money and name recognition than a 13-week series. When an Oscar nominee like Penélope Cruz jumps on board, you know the dynamics have changed. Cruz began a collaboration last year with Mango, a global cheap-chic chain based in Spain. “That’s why she’s not here,” her friend Salma Hayek said at a party earlier this year, meaning that Cruz was busy working on the project. Hayek herself is exceptionally positioned to create a line: She is engaged to François-Henri Pinault, owner of the conglomerate that includes Guc-ci and Yves Saint Laurent. “It’s tricky,” Hayek says when asked if her fiancé might back a design effort. “Someone approached me once about doing one, but that was a long time ago, when it was tacky.”
New York is considered the heart of American designer fashion, but Los Angeles is the sportswear capital of the nation and where the fashion industry’s dominant influencers—stars—live. Screen icons have long initiated fashion trends: Marlon Brando with white tees and leather jackets, Elizabeth Taylor with Butterfield 8 slip dresses. Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Marilyn Monroe, and Lana Turner lent their names to companies for short-term clothing licenses, but traditionally endorsements have been the preferred route to easy money from the fashion industry. Only now have two of L.A.’s main exports, celebrities and sportswear, gone to market hand in hand. Gwen Stefani, an ever-changing trendsetter, went to a New York company to create her L.A.M.B. line, which retails for up to $400. But for her Harajuku Lovers label, whose items cost less than $100 each, she chose an L.A. company, Jerry Leigh. The 45-year-old firm had never worked with a celebrity, but it knows from licensing: It produces 58 million garments a year, mostly sportswear emblazoned with Disney and Warner Bros. characters.
Stefani’s personal appeal and pop-culture-blender aesthetic are major el-ements of Harajuku Lovers’ popularity. The secret ingredient in the recipe, though, is the manufacturer. Jerry Leigh must ensure that its designers translate the singer’s ideas in ways that make the customer feel a connection to her. It must produce garments with enough quality to justify the price—a tough feat in a competitive global industry—and then fill store orders on time, almost always an issue for a new line. For a star, hooking up with a manufacturer with well-oiled distribution to stores is as important as their own Q rating. In the past, manufacturers pursued stars for licensing deals; today Andrew Leigh, son of Jerry and CEO of the company, fields up to seven pitches a week from celebrities or their representatives.
The Jerry Leigh office park in Panorama City seems almost like an entertainment company’s digs, with pale wood, state-of-the-art animation equipment, and sunlight pouring through walls of glass. Andrew Leigh, who is a lean, youthful 49-year-old with cropped gray hair, sits at his desk in jeans and a white dress shirt. He signs a $93,000 check for blank T-shirts and then rises to lead a walk-through of the 250,000-square-foot space. In a cubicle one of the company’s 65 designers shows sketches for Avril Lavigne’s tween license Abbey Dawn, which will bow in July in Kohl’s stores. (It took a year for Lavigne’s manager to get Leigh’s ear before the deal was struck.) Abbey Dawn will be the second celebrity line for the company. “She owns pink and black,” Leigh says of the Grammy winner’s oft-worn color combination, “and she’s going to own fleece in the midtier.”
On the factory floor a silk-screening machine with 18 spokes rotates T-shirts and spreads colored ink on them. A pallet holds hundreds of tees featuring a space alien illustration and the Harajuku Lovers tag line, A Fatal Attraction to Cuteness.
“The success of Harajuku Lovers is in the consistency of its graphics,” Leigh says. Season after season, the manga-inspired line depicts four characters with different identities. “Gwen Stefani understands branding better than anyone I’ve met in the business.”
The farther down the retail food chain you go, the more money there is to be made because of volume. Also, the younger the customer, retailers say, the more likely he or she is to buy something because a celebrity designed it. (“The customer who is really interested in fashion is sophisticated,” Vogue editor Anna Wintour has said. “She will take a Marc Jacobs over a Jessica Simpson every time.”) Harajuku Lovers sales have increased 20 percent each year since it launched in 2005, Leigh says. Adds Simone Tolifson, junior fashion coordinator for Macy’s West, “I have never seen anything sell like it.”