Shopping used to be about brand recognition and quality. Customers could depend on Levi’s for jeans or Nike for athletic sneakers because they specialized in their product. Then celebrities stepped in...
In 1992, a couple of graffiti artists took on the task of creating urban fashion sold out of a small store on Prince Street. Today, Russel Simmons’s Phat Farm is one of the best selling clothing labels started by a music mogul. Sold in more than 3,000 retail stores nationwide, the brand demonstrates Simmons’s ability to market hip-hop culture beyond the albums into a multi-million dollar clothing business.
Since the early ‘90s countless musicians have attempted to follow suit...and failed. Fellow hip-hoppers Busta Rhymes, Master P, Young Buck, Jim Jones, DMX, even Biggie and businessman Dame Dash flopped when it came to selling their fashion lines. More than just a name, Simmons leveraged his business savvy into an empire. He developed the parent company American Design Group to facilitate production and distribution in order to compete with the likes of Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren. The line is now a far cry from the baggy jeans and oversized polo shirts that characterized its early days. But you don’t need to be like Simmons in order to succeed in fashion. Gwen Stefani hit the scene in 2003 with her creation of L.A.M.B. clothing. As No Doubt’s lead singer, Stefani became a style icon for her bold and playful outfits—always sexy, eye-catching, and original. While it is questionable how involved most celebrities are in their lines, Gwen had the design chops to enter the fashion world. She comes from a family of seamstresses and has taken to the sewing machine to create much of her own clothing. Having just debuted her 2010 Spring collection at NYC’s Fall Fashion Week, her fashion venture shows no signs of slowing. And it’s not just style icons stepping into the business.
Carlos Santana, who gained notoriety in the ‘70s for the sounds of his Latin guitar, has made a resurgence with his lines of women’s shoes. It’s hard to imagine that one of the best guitarists of all time would get behind anything less than a hit, and he hasn’t. Appearing in OK!, InStyle, and Cosmopolitan magazines, Santana’s footwear is contemporary and wearable for the everyday, but still hip enough for the runway. These sexy heels adorned models in the Spring 2009 shows for Christian Francis Roth, Venexiana, and Cesar Galindo.
More than just a business enterprise, the shoe line is paired with Santana’s Milagro Foundation, so a portion of the shoe sales go toward helping underprivileged children receive educational programs and health services.
Sometimes it seems like it’s more difficult to find a musician today that isn’t involved in a clothing line than one who is; however, name recognition won’t do it alone. In the digital age of music, hits come and go more quickly than ever. Whether it’s a viable business plan or a gift for design, musician’s clothing lines achieve success because they are more than fashionable, they are fashion.
