The cult item at the New York shows wasn't a handbag, a shoe, or a jacket but a free celebrity magazine
By Charlie Porter, The Guardian
You can imagine their pleasure. With American Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, just a few feet away, most of the audience waiting for the Michael Kors show last Wednesday were reading an article headlined "Anna Wintour - is she just like us?" The piece detailed her diary ("5.45am. Up early for a few games of tennis with a trainer"), her eating habits ("lunch: rare red meat") and how to perfect her front-row "famous knee-clasp". While it was dissected all around her, Wintour maintained her knee-clasp and refused to be tempted to have a peek. Fashion has always been an industry of titbits, but this was something new.
The article appeared in Us Daily, a free paper given away at the shows from the makers of Us, a weekly magazine that is attempting to become the Heat of the US. This instant fashion fix came out three times during New York fashion week and was only available to those attending the shows, becoming the cult item of the collections. Its attitude to clothes, presented purely with a celebrity focus, was so fresh that it could come to epitomise the new way to view American fashion.
"I had a good inkling that it would be a success," says Bonnie Fuller, the recently appointed editor-in-chief of Us who had previously edited the US version of Glamour, "but I was really bowled over. It was great to cover fashion in a brand new way."
This new way of covering fashion might not be revolutionary in Britain, where we are used to regular head-to-toe breakdowns of Victoria Beckham's look. But because London fashion week does not have the same international importance as New York, magazines such as Heat have never had the raw materials - Hollywood stars and leading designers - on their doorstep to capture the true atmosphere of the major collections. With New York's shows happening a few blocks from the Us offices, the Daily became saturated with the mood of the week.
Luckily for the magazine, the front rows were full of celebrities, including Gwyneth Paltrow at Calvin Klein, Britney Spears at Matthew Williamson, Kelly Osbourne and P Diddy at Marc Jacobs, and Sarah Jessica Parker with Sex and the City co-star Kristen Davis at Narciso Rodriguez. In previous seasons, their pictures would have appeared in tabloids around the world, but no magazine in America had realised the potential of writing seemingly anodyne pieces around positive images of celebrities. "Before, in fashion, there was only newspaper and television coverage, which are both fleeting," says Fuller, whose magazine is soon to face fresh competition from InTouch, a new American weekly that has been hiring staff from Heat and British tabloids. "Us is instant, it's got a lot of energy, there's no delay, but because it's a magazine, you want to keep hold of it."
Its influence on the style of America could become very powerful. Many of the current youth trends in the UK have taken off because celebrities were seen wearing a particular item. Famously, Topshop designed a vest similar to one worn by Kate Moss which has become their bestseller. Oversized parkas are the coat of choice for the winter, again because Moss was never seen out of one the last time it was cold. With new styles, most shoppers will decide to take on a trend not because it makes them look good, but because they have seen a celebrity making the style work and want to attempt it for themselves.
My copies of Us Daily have been circulating among friends since I got back from the shows. Most women I know have so far remained immune to the lure of cropped trousers, a style that some designers showed for autumn/winter and which are now appearing everywhere for spring/summer 2003. But the images of actress Jaime King in Us Daily wearing her cropped culottes have encouraged them to reconsider the idea.
King, announced as the best-dressed woman of the week in the final Us Daily, is typical of an Us celebrity. Few would be able to name any of her films but she looks good, hangs out with the hip crowd, is willing to pose and seems interested in trying out new fashion ideas. It is her and her ilk's interest in cropped trousers that will turn them into an accepted trend across America with the help of these new fashion-orientated weekly magazines. In the eyes of Us, Marc Jacobs is just the designer who stitches the cloth together.
There is clearly a downside to this. In the same way that the nationwide obsession with Popstars is suffocating underground forms of music, fashion could find itself sanitised by this overriding interest in which catwalk outfits will make a celebrity look pretty.
Innovative and unsettling ideas were thin on the ground in New York, because they do not fit with this vision of fashion as an easy-to-understand commodity. Bonnie Fuller promises that Us Daily will be back at the next round of New York shows. By then celebrities will be wise to the exposure from these magazines. In turn, designers will create clothes that fit in with this vision. Anyone with a radical viewpoint will be squeezed out. Of course, it could just be that radicalism has already been eradicated because brands need to offer accessible clothes in order to have any chance of profit in these financially difficult times. Us is just cashing in on the one positive aspect of this cautious mood.
The problem is that magazines such as Us are so compelling that even if you worry about what they will do to fashion, you can't help but pick them up. Journalists made sure they knew when the next edition was published, while celebrities hoped they weren't the subject of the few bits of bitching ("Her dad should of bitten her head off" it says of Kelly Osbourne). The final Us Daily featured pictures of Gisele, Paris Hilton and Sarah Jessica Parker reading the paper the day before. As publicity, the publishers couldn't have asked for more.