Hailey Bieber & the Gap Between Fame and Fashion
Plus layering is life
In 1995, Alicia Silverstone's character in Clueless gets robbed at gunpoint and responds by mourning the significance of what she's lost. "This is an Alaïa," she says. "He's, like, a totally important designer."
The joke worked because the film trusted that the people who got it would really get it. Alaïa was not a brand you found through advertising. It was an IYKYK brand.
Thirty years later, that house chose Hailey Bieber as the face of its most definitive campaign.
Peter Mulier’s final work before leaving for Versace. Today, Mulier is a totally important designer, and he spent his last act at Alaïa on her.
As I wrote about here, fame and taste are not the same thing. Visibility and influence are not the same thing. For years, Hailey Bieber could single handedly drive TikTok trends, (and did!), but she always felt fashion-adjacent rather than a serious figure in high fashion.
This week, fronting Alaïa and YSL simultaneously, and cover star of Interview magazine, that feels like it's changed.
But first, every week I recommend three outfits for your week ahead, for work for bru
nch and for attending a wedding.
Here are this week’s three outfits.
Three Outfits
If you’re new here, none of these recommendations are sponsored. I do use affiliate links, so I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them, but every brand and product featured is chosen entirely independently and reflects my genuine taste (for better or financially worse).
Work Outfit
I’ve included House of Dagmar products a few times in this newsletter, particularly their sunglasses, which are a personal weakness of mine, but I haven’t properly spoken about the strength of the brand itself.
The brand had what I can only describe as a statistically unfair advantage when it comes to succeeding in fashion: it was founded by three impossibly chic Swedish sisters.
(Mum & Dad, if you’re reading this, please add this reason to a long list of grievances I have about not getting a sister).
Brands like this, with a clear vision and understanding of understated design, with rich, textured detail, produce the best accessories and footwear. Look at their current offering! It was so hard to pick one for the looks this week but ultimately I can’t go past an animal print.
This week’s work look is also brought to you by my recent obsession with layering button downs. There is something about wearing two shirts at once that looks equally chic and deeply relaxed.
Whether it’s clashing prints, tonal layering or a white collar peeking through a darker shirt, it all adds depth and eccentricity that takes outfit from just looking dressed to styled.
Brunch Outfit
As you’ve probably gathered by now, one of my core styling pillars is layering. It’s the single most useful styling skill you can develop if you want longevity and versatility from your wardrobe without constantly buying new things.
A dress can become a top, or scarf becomes a bandeau, layering shirts become outer layers. All these options allow us to change the context of a single garment and can transform the wardrobe into system of infinite looks.
Your favourite summer dresses can become useful in winter over a turtleneck, and Spring transeasonal outfits emerge from throwing a dress over a Merino tee.
The possibilities multiply very quickly once you stop treating garments too literally.
I especially love layering through texture. The soft rib of the Row tee gives this monochrome look a little friction.
I really started getting into fashion as a creative outlet at university, but as a broke student so much of my style developed through the lens of financial restraint.
And honestly, I think that helped inform much of my personal style.
When you can’t endlessly shop, you’re forced to become more inventive. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.
Here I am this weekend wearing a dress as a top, and layered on top of a cami.
Wedding Outfit
Hailey Bieber & the Gap Between Fame and Fashion
It’s serendipitous that when Hailey launched her brand in 2022, she couldn’t use her married name, a trademark that her husband, Justin Bieber has held since childhood. So she used her middle name, Rhode. A name that was entirely hers, and somewhat symbolically now, so is its success.
In three years, the beauty brand generated $212 million in annual revenue, ranked in the top 26 beauty brands out of nearly 1,000 tracked in the United States, and sold to e.l.f. Beauty for $1 billion.
The fashion industry doesn’t always respect visibility, or virality. It respects a point of view and conviction. What Rhode proved is that Hailey could build something with genuine commercial rigour and a clear creative identity, entirely on her own terms. The fashion industry respects that, how could it not.
Alongside that success, her personal style has evolved from the sexy-tomboy-oversized-everything (but somehow also miniature everything) era with then-stylist Maeve Reilly, to a more sophisticated strategy of restraint. She now works with Dani Michelle and Andrew Mukamal, and the shift shows.
Which brings us to the Alaïa campaign. Mulier shot his final collection for the house with no bags, no jewellery.
To reduce, reduce,” he said of the collection. “No bags, no jewelry. Only beauty and clothes and a naked shoe. Because that’s what Azzedine did.”
Just house codes and a woman, unapologetically sensual and confident in her conviction.
At the same time, Hailey is also the face of the YSL campaign (where are the lawyers with the non-competes??) and the cover star of Interview magazine.
These are not brands that share faces lightly, and Alaïa and YSL are about as directly competitive as two houses can get. The fact that she is the answer both of them arrived at, at the same exact moment, says more than any single campaign could.
Hailey Bieber is a fashion it-girl. The industry is the last to know.
See you next week!
xx
I'll admit that I'm an HB fan and have been ever since her transformation under Dani Michelle (that woman contains magic). I think the HB x Alaia says more about her than the brand (perhaps that's a duh) BUT also with Justin's resurgence, it also bridges the gap of brand recognition to her audience.
PS- Everything you said about layering and being inventive has been very much on my mind lately and it brings me a lot of joy that we are in that together.
To add to this, her new Mango campaign dropped that same week. I love her and what she has done for Rhode but it’s disappointing that this highly respected high fashion brand went with such a commercially sound name