I owe a thank you and an amen to Emily Sandberg who just wrote a blog saying that Sarah Jessica Parker does not deserve the fashion icon credit she has received from Anna Wintour and other business heads. Patricia Field does. Thank you! Thank you, Emily Sandberg for putting in print what I’ve been saying since Sex and the City debuted years ago.
Similar to what Ms. Sandberg said in her article, most know by now that most celebrities don’t dress themselves. You’re hardly an icon if someone is picking out your clothes and doing the heavy lifting for you.
Being a style expert, style consultant, stylist and however else other people describe my profession, it is not with sour grapes or bitterness that I write this. After all, our job is to make our clients look like stylish and the fact that SJP is considered a style icon is a huge nod to Pat Field (as Emily Sandberg said in her blog, “who created SJP’s look and got the ball rolling on her.”) Stylists have been ghosts in the machine for decades churning out some of the most iconic celebrity style without taking much credit or caring about it. In fact, it is only in recent years that the term celebrity stylist was even coined.
Additionally, I wasn’t surprised when SJP was fired from Halston. Uh, what was she doing as Chief Creative Director in the first place? Being a former fashion designer, I’ve made no attempts to hide my distaste for celebrities who become overnight fashion designers. While there are a few celebs out there who have embraced this new found career that I actually respect and who do seem to do more than just slap their name on a label, generally speaking, the whole celebrity designer movement has belittled and demeaned the craft of being a designer. Back in my day you actually had to study and have skills to enter the field. Now you just need to be styled well by someone else and have enough paparazzi photos of your kooka in TMZ.
As a style expert and consultant, I don’t work with celebrities, I don’t dress people for the red carpet and my interest in that world is minimal, at best. Personally, I like my clientele of women who are just extraordinary, powerful, smart, successful who call on me to get their style into shape so it equally reflects what is going on on the inside. However, I think this blog was important because it should be made clear who exactly the icon is…and it isn’t SJP. I’m sorry.
Bridgette Raes is the president of Bridgette Raes Style Group, author of the book Style Rx: Dressing the Body You Have to Create the Body You Want and a sought-after spokesperson, style expert and writer for many media outlets including CNN, Good Morning America and Real Simple Magazine. She and her Style Consultants are available worldwide for consultation, in-person or virtually.
