Rachel Zoe's Exorbitant Styling Fees, Revealed

Rachel Zoe now earns up to $10,000 per styling job. Zoe posed for the cover of The Hollywood Reporter — the venue that originally reported her fee for putting Anne Hathaway in a succession of pretty dresses for the Oscars was “astronomical” — and the magazine got all up in her business: Rachel Zoe International (C.E.O: Roger Berman) employs seven assistant stylists, keeps “nearly a dozen” advisers on retainer (including “intellectual property attorneys, labor attorneys, corporate attorneys, transactional attorneys, business managers, agents, PR reps”), runs a QVC clothing line and a licensed clothing line, and apparently it takes 14 full-time staffers to churn out The Zoe Report. [THR]

Zoe also had this to say about John Galliano: “It’s a little insane and super-sad. Anti-Semitism, racism or any prejudice is not something I tolerate. I’ve fired clients because they were anti-Semitic, or anti-everything, except what they were . . . I’ve known John Galliano and his boyfriend for years. I don’t know enough about it to make a clear statement, but if it’s true, it’s tragic.” [THR]

• Robin Givhan is sick of Dior/Galliano gossip, okay? Everybody stop talking now. “Perhaps to shake themselves out of their fashion funk, folks here in Paris have been playing a vigorous, no-rules, no-facts game of ‘Who will be the next Dior designer?’ During a conversation with Dior Chief Executive Sidney Toledano, one French editor practically demanded that Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci, with a flair for the Gothic and an expertise in couture, get the job: ‘We want Tisci!’ I felt the need to back away slowly and quietly for fear of ending up in someone’s unsubstantiated Twitter feed on the inevitability of Tisci’s appointment. Ladies and gentlemen, can we log off Twitter for just a day so all the facts can catch up with the rumors?” [TDB]
• So is Cathy Horyn, “because, as usual, the people doing the speculating don’t have enough information.” [NYTimes]
• Someone at Hint claims “today we got word from a highly credible source that a [Dior] contract has been signed with Riccardo Tisci. Signed. It sounds pretty final now.” [Hintmag]
• Marc Jacobs said after his Louis Vuitton show that he has not been asked to consider taking over Dior. [IHT]
• The head of Dior‘s parent company, Bernard Arnault of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, is still France’s richest man and the fourth-richest person in the world, according to Forbes‘ annual rich list. Arnault’s personal fortune is some $41 billion. Amancio Ortega, the recently retired founder of Zara, came 7th with $31 billion. H&M’s Stefan Persson was 13th with $24.5 billion. Arnault’s longtime rival, François Pinault, who heads the luxury group PPR (which owns Gucci, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent and Stella McCartney, among others) was 67th with $11.5 billion. Philip Green (and his wife, the legal Monaco resident Cristina, in whose name Topshop is technically held for tax reasons) came 132nd. The last fashion name on the list was Giorgio Armani, who came 136th. In other news of the kleptocracy, the median annual income in the U.S. last year was around $29,000. [Forbes]
• Meanwhile, one Canadian department store is no longer carrying the only John Galliano products they had, his perfumes. The Bay took that decision following the publication of Galliano’s infamous drunken “I love Hitler” Nazi speech. Holt Renfrew still sells the perfume, for now, but has “no plans to market the fragrance going forward.” [Globe & Mail]
• Of all the pressures that are brought to bear on a pretty young woman who just wants to marry her prince, the most daunting must be the proposition of pleasing Daphne Guinness with one’s choice of dress. Daphne freaking Guinness! Luckily, La Guinness has sent Kate Middleton a signal, via a column in the Telegraph, that if she were to choose Alexander McQueen, that would meet Guinness’s expectations. “If the rumours of Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen being the architect of Kate Middleton’s wedding dress are to be believed, it is both wonderful news and an inspired choice,” opines the heiress, who calls making the wedding dress Burton’s “calling.” Are you listening, Kate? [Telegraph]
• Kanye West turned up uninvited to the Louis Vuitton, Alexander McQueen, and Balmain shows this Paris fashion week. In all three cases, the show producers — fashion mega-PR agency KCD — turned him away. At McQueen, he managed to get in through a side door to see the show, but at the other two, he just had to slink off like any dejected fashion rejectee. Is KCD on the outs with Kanye? Whyever else would they let anyone give an on-the-record quote to Page Six about something so embarrassing? [P6]
• Inevitable Kate Moss bodysnark: “Kate Moss gets cellulite just like the rest of us. Even reed-thin supermodels can’t escape the ticking clock of time.” Strangely, this offender isn’t Star magazine or Drunken Stepfather — it’s AOL’s StyleList fashion site, which writes of Moss’s appearance in the Louis Vuitton show yesterday, “She looked great coming down the catwalk, but on her return we got the full picture, and it wasn’t smooth. There was a distinct, cottage-cheesy texture to the backs of Miss Moss’ upper thighs…She gets away with it because, well, she’s Kate Moss! But ladies, please don’t try this look at home.” Cellulite is natural and normal and Kate Moss can have cellulite, but nobody else is allowed to! Is that like, “Sex is normal and a natural part of life, but anybody who tries it outside of an opposite-sex marriage will get an STD and die”? [StyleList]
• Mila Kunis, on the public conflict between Amy Westcott and Rodarte, over credit for the costumes in Black Swan: “I thought the Mulleavys did a beautiful job designing the Swan costumes but Amy Westcott designed the entire film and so I think that Amy truly does deserve the credit for the look of the film. But Natalie and [Kate and Laura Mulleavy] have known each other for many many years and I think that they’re amazing designers.” [Fashionista]
• Suzy Menkes found Sarah Burton‘s latest collection for Alexander McQueen “misogynistic”: “Many of these dresses were beautiful, with their haute couture aesthetic and workmanship, like tiny zippers running vertically around a skirt hem. But it was dispiriting to see a female designer (and on the centennial International Women’s Day) following the McQueen misogyny by strapping her models into harnesses. Take them off and there were lovely dresses.” [IHT]
• Urban Outfitters — which owns its hipsterrific namesake chain, Anthropologie, new wedding thing BHLDN, and Free People — released some mediocre quarterly results yesterday. And it might be because people don’t want to buy and wear skinny jeans anymore and it’s not yet clear what the next pants trend is. Profits for the last quarter were $75.2 million, down from $77.7 million during the same quarter a year ago. The stock slumped by 17%. [NYPost]
• As a potential replacement for skinny jeans, Racked suggests “skinny micro-flares,” a kind of pant that costs $142 and “combines the trendiness of a skinny jean with a leg-proportion-balancing min-flare at the ankle.” They cannot be fucking serious. [Racked]
• American Eagle Outfitters is looking for a new C.E.O. [WWD]
• Extra, Extra, Read All About It: Eyebrow Stylist Creates “Guybrows,” Sells Dudes On Idea Of “Guybrows,” Doubles Market For Services. [NYTimes]
• Among Gap‘s strategies for turning around its sluggish business? Closing 200 store stores. [WWD]
• Sometimes a writer goes to interview a source — say, for a fluffy profile of a creative director who toils in commercial security but fashion obscurity for a major department-store brand, to be published in a major daily newspaper’s style section — and he expects things to be fairly rote, maybe, shit, ask about his “inspirations” or something, nothing out of the ordinary. And then quite as though fumbling for a light switch in the dark, the writer hits upon the dude’s fucking raison d’être, his one weird thing that he just really inexplicably loves, his koan, his spirit animal, his madeleine and his mantra, and suddenly seven paragraphs just write themselves. Including this one: “Mr. Rojo polishes his shoes to relax, the way other people cook. ‘I like this pair,’ he said, holding up Gucci cordovan monk straps and looking at them philosophically. ‘To be or not to be,’ he said, pretending to be Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull.” [NYTimes]