Back then I was way in the back row along with Newsweek and Time, and I used to ask my colleagues, “What’s the deal? Why aren’t we up front? We have much bigger circulations then those other guys!” And they’d say, “The fashion designers think we’re not serious about this. So I started going to the shows and meeting people. When we first started the fashion beat, the question really was: How do we make this interesting to our readers, most of whom are men, who aren’t really interested in clothes? Fashion was playing an increasingly large role in the culture, and in finance, and we thought it needed to be covered in a serious way. But I had covered all sorts of other beats to prepare me for it, like the airline industry. I gather there wasn’t a lot of serious business coverage of fashion outside of the trades back then.

I started at the Journal in 1984, and developed the fashion beat basically from scratch starting in 1989. I interviewed over 125 people for this book, mostly on the record, and used my own institutional knowledge from my years covering fashion.

I didn’t just want to observe and describe the phenomenon I wanted to explain in detail how the celebrity invasion has changed the industry. At the Journal, we’re always trying to see who’s making the money, who’s gaining the market share, who’s cutting deals with whom. I used her story as a way of showing where things were going and sort of went from there.Įvery time you do a complex story like this you just need to follow the money. My story ended with the launch of Jessica’s jeans in big chains like Fashion Bug and Macy’s. Then, in 2005, I did a big page one story for the Journal about Jessica Simpson, who was doing her first jeans collection with Tarrant Apparel Group, and had just left her TV show.

He was the real game changer, starting back in 1991. I had a chapter in there called “What Becomes a Legend Most? When Giorgio Armani Takes Hollywood,” where I started to document and explain the whole phenomenon of the red carpet, and how Armani was using movie stars and pop singers as billboards. It all started with my last book, The End of Fashion, which came out in 1999. Without giving away too much, what’s the premise of Hijacking the Runway ? In her hotly anticipated new book, Hijacking the Runway, veteran Wall Street Journal scoopmistress Teri Agins tackles the celebrity onslaught and what it means for fashion.

The end of fashion by teri agins