Trendsurfing: The celebrity designer (The Times)
By David Rowan
If you knew how tough it was for a celeb to get noticed these days. Forced to house-share with Germaine Greer, mocked by Ant and Dec through the jungle, encaged as deep-ocean shark-bait ... Jeez, there has to be a more dignified way for a limelight-craving star to get some press. Here's a hot trend from Hollywood that might just supply the answer: tell the world that you're also a "conceptual designer". All of a sudden, it's not enough simply to act or make records. Now your creativity must also embrace architecture and interior design, the latest fields to lure A-listers in search of complexity.
Brad Pitt is the poster boy for the new celebrity design movement. If Frank Gehry's £250 million seafront redevelopment in Hove gets the planners' nod, Pitt will be there to help the renowned architect sketch out a restaurant and a penthouse flat. "I'm really into architecture, structure and design," Pitt recently declared in Vanity Fair, the magazine to which the Wilshire Boulevard set devotes a Talmudic scholar's obsessive textual analysis. "Give me anything and I'll design it. (Gehry) said to me, 'If you know where it's going, it's not worth doing.' That's become like a mantra for me. That's the life of the artist."
Sadly, Pitt missed out on the chance to help redesign downtown LA earlier this year, when the Gehry bid - to which he was party - failed to make the final cut. Still, he is currently reported to be designing a Las Vegas hotel with some vital input from George Clooney. Funny thing is, no one is bothering to question these guys' qualifications. When you're pulling in $20 million a movie, it isn't done to ask exactly how long you spent in architecture schoolI so let's just forget that Pitt's college major was journalism.
Still, the showbiz rush is on to join his adopted craft. Hayden Christensen, the current hot property after his leading role in the latest Star Wars film, has announced that he's considering abandoning Hollywood to study architecture. Jade Jagger, better known for her Garrard baubles, is now designing rooms for Philippe Starck's Yoo apartment chain, while the musician Lenny Kravitz has been sketching out his own hotel complexes and recording studios. Heck, even celebrity milliner Philip Treacy is in on the trend, accepting the role of "design director" for a new 96-room hotel on the west coast of Ireland. "I started by designing the door handles," explains the man with the hats. "It was exciting to start with a door handle because hotels are full of them. It's a fluid, elegant door handle. And it's ... very me."
It's not difficult to understand what's going on here. The talent longs to appear creatively gifted, and architecture and design convey an attractive aura of artistic intrigue. Commercial developers, meanwhile, know that a famous name attached to a building brings in the cash. A similar logic explains why the musicians Damon Dash and Nelly have successfully extended their empires into clothing brands, and why every celeb from J-Lo to Sarah Jessica Parker is striking deals to market personalised fragrances.
J-Lo as an amateur perfumier, you can perhaps understand. But scents from David and Victoria Beckham, Donald Trump, even Sir Cliff Richard's concoction of ylang ylang, rose and jasmine "inspired by his childhood in India"? Good grief. Can you imagine how his skyscrapers are going to look?
(The Times Magazine, August 13 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
If you knew how tough it was for a celeb to get noticed these days. Forced to house-share with Germaine Greer, mocked by Ant and Dec through the jungle, encaged as deep-ocean shark-bait ... Jeez, there has to be a more dignified way for a limelight-craving star to get some press. Here's a hot trend from Hollywood that might just supply the answer: tell the world that you're also a "conceptual designer". All of a sudden, it's not enough simply to act or make records. Now your creativity must also embrace architecture and interior design, the latest fields to lure A-listers in search of complexity.
Brad Pitt is the poster boy for the new celebrity design movement. If Frank Gehry's £250 million seafront redevelopment in Hove gets the planners' nod, Pitt will be there to help the renowned architect sketch out a restaurant and a penthouse flat. "I'm really into architecture, structure and design," Pitt recently declared in Vanity Fair, the magazine to which the Wilshire Boulevard set devotes a Talmudic scholar's obsessive textual analysis. "Give me anything and I'll design it. (Gehry) said to me, 'If you know where it's going, it's not worth doing.' That's become like a mantra for me. That's the life of the artist."
Sadly, Pitt missed out on the chance to help redesign downtown LA earlier this year, when the Gehry bid - to which he was party - failed to make the final cut. Still, he is currently reported to be designing a Las Vegas hotel with some vital input from George Clooney. Funny thing is, no one is bothering to question these guys' qualifications. When you're pulling in $20 million a movie, it isn't done to ask exactly how long you spent in architecture schoolI so let's just forget that Pitt's college major was journalism.
Still, the showbiz rush is on to join his adopted craft. Hayden Christensen, the current hot property after his leading role in the latest Star Wars film, has announced that he's considering abandoning Hollywood to study architecture. Jade Jagger, better known for her Garrard baubles, is now designing rooms for Philippe Starck's Yoo apartment chain, while the musician Lenny Kravitz has been sketching out his own hotel complexes and recording studios. Heck, even celebrity milliner Philip Treacy is in on the trend, accepting the role of "design director" for a new 96-room hotel on the west coast of Ireland. "I started by designing the door handles," explains the man with the hats. "It was exciting to start with a door handle because hotels are full of them. It's a fluid, elegant door handle. And it's ... very me."
It's not difficult to understand what's going on here. The talent longs to appear creatively gifted, and architecture and design convey an attractive aura of artistic intrigue. Commercial developers, meanwhile, know that a famous name attached to a building brings in the cash. A similar logic explains why the musicians Damon Dash and Nelly have successfully extended their empires into clothing brands, and why every celeb from J-Lo to Sarah Jessica Parker is striking deals to market personalised fragrances.
J-Lo as an amateur perfumier, you can perhaps understand. But scents from David and Victoria Beckham, Donald Trump, even Sir Cliff Richard's concoction of ylang ylang, rose and jasmine "inspired by his childhood in India"? Good grief. Can you imagine how his skyscrapers are going to look?
(The Times Magazine, August 13 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
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