Ungaro, Looking for a Jolt, Hires Lohan
By
ERIC WILSON
Published: September 9, 2009
EARLY this summer, Esteban Cortazar, the fashion prodigy and, for three seasons, the designer of the Paris fashion house Ungaro, balked when his bosses presented a plan to hire the actress
Lindsay Lohan as his collaborator. According to a retail executive who is friendly with Mr. Cortazar, but who spoke on condition of anonymity because she did not want to jeopardize her store’s relationship with the house, he was asked an ultimate indignity: to take a bow atthe end of his runway show while holding Ms. Lohan’s hand. Mr. Cortazar quit in July.
On Wednesday, Ungaro announced that Ms. Lohan, whose public flameout was the talk of Hollywood in 2007, has indeed become its artistic adviser, working with a new chief designer, Estrella Archs. The move immediately raised eyebrows in the fashion world, because Ms. Lohan, who is not always known for her facility for keeping her clothes on, would become part of the artistic legacy of a 43-year-old label whose namesake, Emanuel Ungaro, was once a protégé of Cristobal Balenciaga, described in the Who’s Who of Fashion as “possibly the greatest couturier of all time.”
Mounir Moufarrige, the chief executive of the company, acknowledged in an interview that the move would likely create waves among French fashion purists, possibly even charges of bad taste, but he argued that the times called for a maneuver he likened to “electric shock treatment.”
Sales of the high-end Ungaro collection have dropped substantially since Mr. Ungaro sold his business in 1996, and none of the designers hired to replace him since his retirement five years ago have managed to draw much attention to the label. Mr. Moufarrige, who joined the label in 2006 and has previously turned around the fortunes of French luxury labels like Goyard and Chloé (with the controversial appointment of
Stella McCartney as its designer in 1997), said it was unlikely that a single fashion designer who fits the traditional mold could rebuild Ungaro during the recession. The label, which has global sales of about $200 million, mostly from cheaper products sold in Japan and scarcely from the high-end runway collection, has been losing money for several years. Mr. Moufarrige would not say how much, only that, as a minority shareholder, he was not in the habit of throwing it away.
“A designer alone is not enough to get us back where we were, unless I had
Tom Ford or Phoebe Philo,” he said. “But there are not many of those, and they are taken.”
Mr. Cortazar, who started his own label in Miami as a teenager, was also a controversial choice to design the collection, which is largely seen as a vehicle for marketing more than a profit maker for the company. Despite encouraging reviews, his work was not garnering sales or international press as the company was expanding in China and Japan. He was not available to comment on his replacements. Typically, it takes a designer, even a hot one, years to build a strong reputation, and Ungaro has been faulted for changing its creative head every couple of seasons, damaging its reputation among editors and retailers. Mr. Moufarrige said he was not afraid of shaking things up once again.
“We could spend two or three years with a designer and get a great collection again,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean people will buy it. Everybody’s got a nice collection.” But a celebrity, that’s another story, and one who draws the spotlight just for selling a line of leggings couldn’t do worse. “I looked at several, and they all had the same ingredients,” Mr. Moufarrige said. “If you are a celebrity, you may be controversial and prone to a lot of problems, but you attract a lot of attention.”
Ms. Lohan has not had an easy time rehabilitating her reputation among movie makers, and her last film, “Labor Pains,” went straight to cable. But Mr. Moufarrige said her notoriety was a plus, and he pointed out that she has appeared on the cover of countless fashion magazines, like Elle and Harper’s Bazaar in the United States and international editions of Vogue.
“The girl is good-looking,” he said. “If I have bad taste, then the fashion editors have bad taste.”
Ms. Lohan, in a phone interview, said she was trying not to psyche herself out by considering how the French might respond to her new role at Ungaro, or comparing herself to the designer, but she was a little nervous.“My fashion school has just been my experience with people in fashion, working on photo shoots and creating my own style,” she said. Asked how she felt about Mr. Cortazar’s departure from the house, given her impending arrival, she said: “I’m not coming in to take over and take away from anyone. I’m just bringing insight to things.”
She has wanted to work in fashion since she was a little girl, she said, and she follows the industry closely. She did, in fact, know that Mr. Ungaro once worked for Balenciaga. “When I say I love fashion, I really do,” she said. “I live and breath fashion and clothing. There are so many designers I really admire and look up to. It’s such a rush for me. There’s this Balmain motorcycle jacket, and when I got one of the few they made without the shoulder pads, I literally screamed. Some people might look at me like I’m crazy or like I’m psychotic, but it makes me really happy.”
More to the point, Mr. Moufarrige’s strategy reflects a change in fashion that is being driven by the recession. It no longer makes sense, he said, to pay a star designer a $3 million salary. Though he would not say how much he is paying Ms. Lohan, he does expect a higher dividend, given the inevitable attention her involvement will generate.
“She’s a very clever person,” he said. “She’s not a designer. She’s an artistic adviser. She gives ideas on what she would wear. And I needed to bring down the average age group of Ungaro. The average age right now is 60.”
