The fashion factor: The fashion secrets behind the X Factor

When The X Factor’s familiar opening music starts at about 7.30pm every Saturday, millions of people across the country will be sprucing themselves up for a night out, using the show as a soundtrack to the blending of blusher, or the application of hair gel. For the contestants, however, the ritual of dressing up begins much earlier: at about 9am in a shiny, white wardrobe trailer that resembles a huge fridge, parked inside the stark concrete complex of Fountain Studios in Wembley. This is where the hit show, hailed as one of the saviours of Saturday night television, is filmed.

 

 

At the heart of the X Factor formula is the makeover. It would never attract audiences of around 10 million without the fantastic wardrobes, because it needs the sartorial rollercoasters of the “before and after” to heighten the emotional ones so frequently invoked by the contestants. It needs the glitz, the glamour and the “water-cooler moments”, as head stylist Faye Sawyer describes the sequinned suit and fur coat that finalist Rhydian Roberts wore last series. Accordingly, the wardrobe trailer is where the contestants come to be transformed, or, as someone immune to The X Factor’s cheesy charms might see it, the products in the dream factory come to be packaged.

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Inside the trailer, Sawyer, dressed in a sexy but authoritative fitted black dress with a gold chain necklace, heads a team of stylists and seamstresses who are variously engaged in sewing sequins on to a nautical hat and crystals on to a dress (you can never have too much bling on television, apparently), helping the contestants into their outfits, and ironing. Sawyer has recruited three extra people today because the contestants are performing their charity cover single, “Hero”, and this demands a quick costume change. “I don’t really see how we can get 13 people changed in three minutes, 40 seconds,” she says, anxiously, “you’ll have to start undressing the minute you come off stage.” Styling a contestant such as Austin Drage looks about as easy as dressing a jumping bean. He bounces about the trailer, waving his ringing mobile, and tells me, whilst stripped down to his boxers to reveal a tattoo of a pair of outspread wings across his shoulder blade, to “stop writing and start taking some pictures”.

Up until the mid-afternoon dress rehearsal, all the contestants will come into the wardrobe trailer, as well as the hair and make-up rooms, to be squeezed, laced or zipped into their stage outfits. Today, the garments on the rails are for Week 3’s “big band” theme, which facilitates the kind of show-stopping, brassy glamour The X Factor thrives on. Think satin, big hair and sequins – and that’s just the boys. Simon Cowell described 17-year-old contestant Diana Vickers, who has a distinctive voice, as “the singing version of Marmite – you either love it or hate it”, and the same could be said of the ensembles on the show. Most people see genuine flashbulb-popping glamour, some camp razzmatazz, while fans of edgy clothes might apply Louis Walsh’s acerbic verdict on ejected girl band Bad Lashes – that they looked like “a bunch of hairdressers” – to many of the contestants. Avant-garde fashion this is not.

“I do sometimes want to do something a bit edgier,” said stylist Faye Sawyer, as I accompanied her on a pre-show shopping mission to Selfridges and Topshop earlier in the week, “but then I often think, ‘are they really going to be able to work that, or will it overpower them?’ The mark of a really good stylist is making sure that the clothes don’t wear the people, because then that will make them really uncomfortable.”

For every girl such as Diana, who is young and fashion-conscious, or Ruth Lorenzo, with her impressive curves, there is someone such as Daniel Evans. Louis Walsh might have been overly harsh when he compared him to Ricky Gervais, but at 38 he isn’t obvious teen heart-throb material. “I’m secretly loving all this makeover stuff,” he confides in the trailer, plastered in the deepest of orange foundations. “It’s nice having suits made for you when you are used to shopping in Matalan, Primark and Tesco.” He’s also had his eyelashes and hair dyed, although the latter process went slightly wrong and left him with a gingery Jaffa Cake shade. The teeth whitening didn’t go so well, either. As if to shore up his “everyman” credentials, Daniel found it so hard to resist having a nice cup of tea after the treatment that he ignored the rule of no dark liquids for 24 hours, and scuppered the dazzling effect. All the contestants have their teeth whitened – something Sawyer sees not as vanity, but a process to prepare for performing, and instil confidence – “they are singers, and the camera focuses on the mouth,” she says. That other X Factor stereotype, fake tan, has been less prominent this year, to the relief of make-up artist Adam De Cruz. “Last year, we had some real fake-tan addicts, who even declared themselves “tanorexics”. Hope were too orange, even under the lights.”

Perhaps the toning-down of the fake tan symbolises the way the clothes have become more sophisticated over several series. Ellie Crompton, style editor of Heat magazine, certainly thinks that people are taking more notice of X Factor fashion. “This series, our coverage has filtered through from the features pages into fashion.” She says, “the clothes are definitely better, and having fashion-conscious judges has helped. I can see a bit of a Cheryl [Cole] influence on Diana: she has the same hippie-ish look, but now it’s more polished boho.” Crompton says that Cheryl has gone from a “classic Wag” to a more pared-down, glossy look. “Diana also captures people’s imaginations, because she is a bit ethereal and different but not too off the wall.”

Loitering Bambi-like outside the make-up room, Diana says that the stylists “have got me down to a tee. I hoped they would take my look and make it better, and they have.” Diana’s signature messy hair makes her stand out on television, where the hairdryer is king. “I started backcombing my hair aged 11,” she says, “I disowned my brush and it’s gradually got bigger.”

Judge Dannii Minogue agrees that “it’s really important that the contestants project a unique style. Faye Sawyer is awesome at working with them to highlight their best features.”

Crompton says, “the magazine gets a lot of readers asking where they can buy something the girls in the show have worn,” and that curiosity can now be satisfied by the new fashion area of the X Factor website. So far, the site has received more than 1,500 emails about fashion, and reveals that the contestants wear a perhaps surprising number of designer outfits mixed with the high-street names. The naval-inspired micro-mini that Alexandra wore for the big band-themed night was a heavily customised Alexander McQueen dress, while fellow British designers Matthew Williamson, Alice Temperley and Julien Macdonald have also featured. Sawyer also commissions a lot of bespoke tailoring by British labels such as Savile Row tailor Richard Anderson and Antony Price, who made suits for Bryan Ferry.

Sawyer finds out the themes for the next week’s show on the Sunday before, after which she and her team dash around begging, borrowing or buying clothes and accessories, as well as back-up outfits. Minogue, who works with Sawyer on the contestants she mentors, says “it takes a few weeks with some of them to get it right, but we are always up against time pressure with their availability between rehearsals.”

Sawyer says the rapid turnaround means that she has “done a few things that weren’t great”, such as Girlband in the first week. “I’ve styled Sophie Ellis-Bextor and I was going for something similarly ironic, with an Eighties pop edge. Unfortunately, the bright jewel colours made them look like Quality Street and it translated really badly on set.” Similarly, the red, green and orange sequinned lining to boy band JLS’s jackets in Week 3 made them look like flashers standing under traffic lights. However, as with the Oscars, or any red-carpet event, the fashion wouldn’t be nearly as engaging if it were perfect every time. The misses make the hits all the sweeter.

Rachel Hylton’s first two outfits – a boxy trouser suit and a gold lamé jacket – missed the mark, but when she sees her big-band outfit in the trailer, it is love at first sight. “I love it, I love it!” she cries, hugging the green silk ballgown on the rail. Later she gives the performance of the night. As her mentor, Dannii Minogue, says of the contestants, “they project with more conviction if they look like stars”.

Olsen Twins fashion image

Skinny girls with blank expressions and seemingly little inclination to speak have fascinated American culture for so long that their proliferation now, in magazines like Us Weekly and In Touch and shows like “The Hills,” seems less a modern scourge than a historic inevitability.

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The mid-19th century witnessed the emergence of the aptly named fasting girls, women in their teens and early 20s whose silence and diminutive size stirred the interest of a public that believed they were spiritually extraordinary. Later they found analogues in figures like Edie Sedgwick, on whom so many fantasies – stylistic, sexual, psychological – were projected, and more recently in the phenomenon of the Olsen twins.

Who are the Olsens? What are the Olsens? Biographically speaking, they are the genetically fraternal but identical-looking sisters, Mary-Kate and Ashley, 22, who laid initial claim to our attention when they shared the role of Michelle Elizabeth Tanner in the 1980s and ’90s on the family comedy “Full House.”

Symbolically, they are harder to define because they defy the standard categories of American celebrity. They have acted, but acting is now just a peripheral part of their identity. They appear regularly in tabloids, yet they cannot fairly be included among the Parises and Nicoles, the Laurens and Heidis – the sisterhood of young women famous only for their professional apathy.

The Olsens, as it happens, do quite a bit: They oversee 18 employees as co-presidents of the multimillion-dollar company Dualstar Entertainment Group, which distributes the direct-to-video movies they made when they were younger and, through licensing arrangements, produces furniture, rugs, lighting and cosmetics for girls 8 to 12. Through a licenser, the Olsens also turn out a line of bohemian women’s clothing called Elizabeth and James, and on their own they produce a more rarefied label, for women with the means to buy Chanel or Prada, called the Row. Most recently they have also written a book, “Influence” (Razorbill), that seeks to convey the essence of their creative vision, citing as sources of inspiration designers, fashion photographers and artists, among them Karl Lagerfeld, Terry Richardson and Richard Prince.

The biggest misperception about the Olsens “is that we don’t work,” Mary-Kate explained over tea one afternoon recently in a cafe where the waitress later confided to me that her little sister, growing up in Kosovo, had wallpapered her bedroom with pictures of the twins. Mary-Kate had just come back from Paris, where she and Ashley had been meeting with buyers to sell the next collection of the Row. On the way back, the women had stopped in London to promote Elizabeth and James to Selfridges. “This whole idea that we don’t do anything seems crazy to us because we have been working since we were 9 months old,” Mary-Kate said.

It is the Row – which takes its name from Savile Row – that has led to the Olsens’ elevation by some of the most exacting arbiters in fashion. The line, which first appeared in the spring of 2007, made its press debut in American Vogue, won fans at French Vogue and immediately attracted the attention of some of the most discriminating stores here and abroad: Maxfield in Los Angeles, Maria Luisa in Paris, Harvey Nichols in London, Barneys in New York.

Most designers begin by serving a moneyed clientele and then work their way to the mass market, but the Olsens have made the unusual and more difficult move of going in reverse, beginning in Wal-Mart and finding their way to Madison Avenue. The idea for the line began with Ashley’s wish to engineer the perfect T-shirt. It has since grown to a full wardrobe. The clothes are in some sense like the Olsens themselves, outwardly ethereal but fundamentally practical – skirts, jackets, sweaters, from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, that no urbane 40-year-old woman would look foolish or desperate wearing. The two initially hired a designer to produce the line, but now they design it themselves.

As Ashley explained to me after I spoke to her sister (the Olsens prefer not to be interviewed together): “There was a lot to learn, obviously. You have to learn about fabrics, mills, pricing, what your margins need to be, merchandising and marketing. I was fortunate to know a lot of people from my personal life who were really able to teach me a lot.”

Mary-Kate’s contribution to the enterprise is a collector’s knowledge. She has been buying vintage Lanvin and Givenchy, among other classic labels of the mid-20th century, for a number of years. (Unlike Ashley, Mary-Kate continues to act, having played, with a perfect semblance of haze and obfuscation, a born-again Christian drug dealer on the third season of “Weeds.” This year she appeared opposite Ben Kingsley in the film “The Wackness.”) Ashley is the more entrepreneurial, the one who will tell you how much she admires Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

“I’m focused on building a true American brand,” she said, explaining why it was important to her that the line be manufactured in New York. “For me, it was the control. I needed to make sure I could see the product being made. Things like this are successful when you really care, when you are paying attention to every single detail.”

The Olsens are known for keeping a tight grip on their image, but their general reluctance to talk to the press has left them ceding ground to tabloids eager to construct the narrative. The sisters began appearing regularly in the pages of the supermarket weeklies when they moved to Manhattan to study at New York University a few years ago. The magazines followed Mary-Kate’s struggle with anorexia in 2004 and then became fixated on how the twins dressed, running picture after picture of the two in big, round glasses and loose, layered knits, implying something deranged and effortful in a look that suggested Janis Joplin.

“I was from L.A., and layering made sense to me,” Mary-Kate explained. “I was cold. I put on whatever was on the floor when I woke up.” The look seemed constructed to make her disappear, but it rendered an entirely different effect.

 

 

The pursuit by paparazzi has not ebbed, and it remains a persistent source of anxiety for the Olsens. “Honestly, I’m a wreck,” Ashley said. “Every time I see a camera, I’m a wreck.” The sisters had just been surrounded by photographers in London a few days earlier. “I don’t tend to react as though ‘I have to do this, it’s my job,’ ” Ashley continued. “I am reacting as a woman who is 5- foot-1 whose space is being invaded by a bunch of men whose aggression I can literally feel. In L.A. it is even worse because they are running red lights behind you, and I worry all the time about something terrible happening, someone getting hurt because of me, how I could ever possibly live with that. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have kids in the back seat and have to go through this and pretend for their sake that you are not scared.”

“Influence” is the Olsens’ effort at self-revelation, at wresting the story back, but even as an unconventional stab at autobiography, the book is hesitant and receding, composed almost entirely of interviews with other people. Over a few months, Mary-Kate and Ashley talked to people they admired to discover how they work, what inspires them, and “Influence” is merely a catalog of their affinities and received fashion wisdom. In the book, each sister briefly answers the Proust questionnaire, and here we learn that Mary-Kate’s favorite poets are Whitman and Blake and that Ashley loves “Great Expectations,” peonies and Christopher Guest.

Although it is nearly impossible to imagine Paris Hilton citing Dickens, what most distinguishes the Olsens from their peers in the tabloids is a resistance to certain kinds of recklessness on the one hand and a decidedly less egomaniacal approach to branding on the other.

Hilton commodifies the image of a sexually untamed heiress – herself. But the Olsens sell a wide variety of products that have nothing to do with their lifestyle, a concept they have purposefully left vague.

 

 

A visit to their Web site, Mary-KateandAshley.com, provides the opportunity to view the modernist bracelets the Olsens produce with the well-regarded jeweler Robert Lee Morris and also to buy “Our Lips Are Sealed,” an eight-year-old movie in which they star, about two girls forced into a witness-protection program on the beaches of Australia.

The Olsens seem to regard themselves above all as artist-moguls, and the challenges they describe are the challenges of businesspeople. They have to figure out how to deal with expanding the Row while still letting it feel like a quiet discovery for whoever is buying it. As Ashley sees it, her career is brand building, in fashion and beyond. “It is what I love. There are so many voids in the market, and I want to find those opportunities and make the most of them.”

It isn’t the cover of Vogue they seem to seek as much as the cover of Fortune.

Insider View

In his movie Fashion that released this week, Madhur Bhandarkar plays himself in a cameo. The frame catches him sitting in the front row of a fashion show, while characters whisper in awestruck tones that he is there researching his latest project — the fashion industry. This self-congratulatory pat on his back is possibly the least irksome part of Bhandarkar’s three-hour-fifteen-minute-long movie. Watching it in PVR Saket, top model Sonalika Sahay and designer Vineet Bahl protest vehemently about the movie and Bhandarkar, who has built a reputation as a hard-hitting filmmaker who doesn’t dumb down to appease the audience. “It is very clichéd. He has strung together a few sensational events and tried to filter an opinion through them,” says Sahay.

Sahay’s ire is directed at the screenplay of the movie — the story of three models: a small-town beauty pageant winner, played by Priyanka Chopra, who makes it big very fast, a supermodel played by Kangana Ranaut who is addicted to drugs and alcohol and a second-rung model, Mugdha Godse, who figures out how to hold her own in the big, bad world of modelling. Bhandarkar’s disclaimer at the beginning of the movie that all the characters and events are fictitious doesn’t ring true as a doped-out Ranaut lands up on the footpath a la Gitanjali Nagpal, and Chopra’s character descends into the allegedly murky side of fashion — dope, alcohol and rehab, much like England-educated Shivani Kapur did a couple of years back. “Bhandarkar should have given the movie a broader perspective. This whole thing about small-town girls losing their heads in modelling is so insulting. I’m from Bihar and let me tell you, exploitation is a matter of choice,” says Sahay. “There’s a nicer side to the industry as well, like friendships and creativity.”

The stress on supermodels and showstoppers throughout the movie, says Sahay, is also dated. “It’s something that used to happen in the initial stages of the industry. We are way past those days when a show was only about the showstopper. The only believable bit about the movie is Mugdha, probably because being part of the industry, she knows how it works and makes it look a little more credible,” she says. Newbie designer Vineet Bahl agrees in part with Sahay. While he is impressed with the histrionics of Chopra and…

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FIRST GOLD PIECE POST

Hey everyone I just wanna introduce myself and the blog to everyone although the only people who will read this probably know me.  My name is James, I am one of three owners of a NYC based streetwear clothing company.  Please feel free to check out our site www.duanenyc.com. This blog will just be an all around collection of things that I feel are interesting or noteworthy in my life.  It will consist of everything from  inside the industry streetwear related news to funny videos and art.

As a first post i figure Ill just take a quick second to mention that Duane NYC has done a re-release of the “Americas Most Wanted-Obama Tee”.  It is being released in three new colors that consist of teal, purple, and  red.  (Original was yellow).  They are currently being sold at Goliath NY and Vault.  Actually I was wearing one when I was buying my iphone in the apple store the other day and a couple employees told me that they had purchased the tee the day before.  Which was music to my ears considering that the tee had only been in stores for a day.

Duane's Teal Obama Tee

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