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“Juicy/Couture,” by Sally Singer, was originally published in the April 2003 issue of Vogue.
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It's backstage at the Chanel couture show, and the Juicys, with yours truly in tow, are looking for Lagerfeld. The Juicys—Gela Taylor and Pam Skaist-Levy (also known as Fluffy and Fluffy, also known as the women behind Juicy Couture)—are dressed identically, as is their wont. Gela wears a brown tweed, fur-collared Chanel mini suit with a Juicy tee proclaiming REBEL COUTURE, three-year-old boots from Burberry, and a whole lot of ice. And Pam—like Gela, lithe, long-haired, elfin—wears exactly the same thing, exactly. Theirs is an ultraluxe, “I'm with the band” glamour. I am in a black Chanel dress and lace jacket, Veronique Branquinho boots, and a pay-me-no-heed parka from Habitual, no ice.
“Karl? I saw him in the cabine with the clothes,” says a pretty PR in black, wallflower-chic Chanel, and off we charge into a makeshift changing room where Stella Tennant is bouncing her baby on her knee, Natasha Vojnovic is being fitted into a confection of deconstructed tulle and tweed, and everything everywhere is pale, pale pink. Nope, il n'est pas là. So it's on to the makeup cabine, which means the Juicys and I crash, La Femme Nikita style, through the kitchen of the Pavillon Ledoyen restaurant, where penguin-suited waiters are furiously scooping up fruit salads (this is Paris, and the restaurant is not going to let a little matter of the couture stop the cuisine).
In makeup, still no Karl, but we're getting hotter. Amanda Harlech, his muse, is here, dressed in black don't-mind-me Chanel couture. She bows to the Juicys and asks if it is “their first couture.” They say yes. And she replies, “I couldn't imagine what it would be like to not see the couture, when the clothes are brought down to the atelier after a long night and he starts working. I would miss the passion, the pride, the emotion. . . .”
“It's the same for us,” says Gela, no doubt thinking of all-night fittings in Pacoima, California, for that perfect low-waisted sweatpant. Lady Harlech thinks her boss might just be back in the cabine with the clothes, so it's through the kitchen again, but not before the Juicys are tackled by a British fashion journalist croaking, “The Juicys are here! I love the Juicys!” (No doubt thinking of the Beatles-like hysteria the pair caused when they opened their boutique at Harvey Nichols this year; there were lines around the block, and Englishwomen are not in the habit of lining up for clothes.) We run into Issy Blow, dressed for a Venetian ball at 10:00 A.M. in mask and cape. “Hello, Juicys!” she hollers. “Love your sparklers!” And then, there he is, Herr Lagerfeld himself: lithe, long-haired, elfin. Pam and Gela approach nervously and turn pale, pale pink when introduced. “We've brought you a present,” they say in unison. The designer beams. “Welcome, welcome! I love a present!” It's a velour tracksuit, and it's monogrammed SLIM.
The pilgrimage from Pacoima to Paris, and from basse couture to haute couture, is not as improbable as one might think. Pictures of Lagerfeld and Valentino, torn from pages of magazines, are tacked to the wall above Gela Taylor's desk, while Pam gazes up at Yohji; pictures of Galliano frocks are everywhere. For some time now, the girls have been sending specially made T-shirts to their fashion heroes—call it Juicy Couture couture—in the hope of making a connection between the dingy industrial parks and Taco Bells of their San Fernando Valley headquarters and the City of Light. To Galliano they sent a KING OF THE FUCKING UNIVERSE tee, and to McQueen, MCQUEEN OF THE FUCKING UNIVERSE. Although these offerings have never been acknowledged, they have received word of Galliano jogging along the Seine in said top. Nothing could be more thrilling to the Juicys; these are women who love fashion, wear fashion, dream fashion. When I called to invite them to the Paris collections, unfeigned screams of joy (Pam: “I have to call my husband!”) and the clatter of high heels jumping for joy (really) sounded in my ear. “You are our Ed McMahon!” said Gela. “We've won the golden ticket.”
The irony, of course, is that Juicy Couture is everybody else's golden ticket. As I traveled across the country last year, speaking with women about fashion, the only thing that united the nation was an obsessive interest in Juicy velours—should the tracksuit go to a dinner party? The dog run? The school cafeteria? A date? The in-laws? A cocktail? (Answer: yes to all the above.) But where isn't it sold out? And have you seen one in cashmere? And aren't their linen skirts fabulous—and, in the eyes of one observer, “not too missy”? And how many pairs of their jeans do you own? (“I don't fit in a lot of pants,” says Gwen Stefani, a huge fan.) The Juice, it would seem, is everywhere. Stefanie Greenfield of New York's Scoop boutiques says, “Between New York and L.A., I've never seen so much Juicy. I was in L.A. at the Coffee Bean &Tea Leaf in my black velour, and there were two behind me in line and one in front. And I was like, what is this, the Ashram? This gives new meaning to uniform dressing.” When Robert Forrest of Ungaro recently flew back from Rio, there were three people on his plane in the tracksuit. “Thank God, they were wearing different colors.”
A craze is upon us, one that validates the lifestyle of the yoga-practicing, self-employed, cheerful, rock-'n'-roll soccer mom. It's Madonna and Lourdes in Regent's Park. It's Gwyneth with a Starbucks coffee on the way to Jivamukti. It's Jenny from the block—“Don't be fooled by the sweats that I got”—with Ben, still wearing Juicy instead of J.Lo. It also seems to be the garment of choice for the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown: Mariah Carey wore Juicy on her way to the loony bin, Lizzie Grubman on her way to jail, and the Gucci murderess a white Juicy sweatsuit at the victim's funeral. More innocently, and quintessentially, it's Gela and her husband, John Taylor—the good-looking, reflective one from Duran Duran—watching their daughters play soccer at Fairfax High and looking parental and fabulous in orange cashmere hoodie, flared jeans, glittered T-shirt, Hermès belt, new-season Balenciaga bag, and Ugg boots (her) ; and brown velour Juicy men's track top, dark-gray baggy Juicy pants, and tweed newsboy cap (him). It's nonfashion at its most fashionable, and it may be a moment, or it may be the future of the way we dress.
After the Yohji show in Paris—Edwardian silhouettes in exuberantly scaled houndstooth checks—Gela asks, “It's beautiful, but where would you wear that? Does anyone get really dressed up anymore?” To which Pam, who married wearing Yohji, a Victorian petticoat, and boots, says, “I'd wear it. Over jeans, with T-shirts. . . .” Pam, it should be noted, is a punk at heart, and anything houndstoothy makes sense to her. In the late seventies and early eighties in Los Angeles, she worked as a waitress at Sushi on Sunset, was obsessed with the band X (of the hit “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline”), and wore slashed jeans over men's boxers. This is how she appeared to her husband of seventeen years, Jeff Levy, now a film director/producer, then a member of Johnson, the rock band. Although Pam now wears Valentino and there is a baby seat strapped in the back of the family Ferrari (the fastest automatic in the world) and their Hollywood Hills home is full of original Barcelona daybeds stacked high with Hermès blankets, Pam's irrepressible punk tendencies still surface. When her local video store wouldn't sell her favorite X (the band, not the rating) video, she borrowed it permanently, steamed the label off, and attached the label to a blank video. She's now banned. (“Why didn't you make a copy of it?” asks a puzzled Bryan Adams over dinner in Paris. “It's a video.”) She's also banned from eBay because she reneged on a purchase of a vintage Pac-Man machine after she realized that it would prevent her either from working or from ever speaking again to her two-year-old boy, Noah. Now she steals friends' passwords and computers to bid for art glass. Pam has not been banned from shopping at Hermès, at least not yet: At the London store recently, she bought a pair of gloves, then asked for a pair of scissors, then, in full view of the horrified staff, snipped off the fingers. “Aren't they cooler?” she demands.
Pam wears the gloves in Paris, with matching Hermès muffler and hat, not to mention alligator Birkin, to shop at the flea market. Gela accompanies her, in exactly the same gear, even down to the gloves, even down to the Birkin. Pam buys a bunch of chandeliers, but Gela, in a rare moment of non-twindom, resists. Her home, also in the Hollywood Hills, is lit by Verner Panton “Fun” lamps from the sixties, ethereal mother-of-pearl clusters that she found in Italy. Vintage shopping is one area in which the Juicys are forced to go their separate ways purchase-wise. At a St.-Germain depot de vente called Ragtime, Gela snaps up a white fox mini coat (the Juicys love a fur!) and a delicate ivory twenties nightgown (“so pretty for the summer”). Pam grabs a stack of Gosford Park esque frocks (“great for the office with a tee or over jeans”), a fur cloche from Patou, and unblocked straw-hat forms from the thirties. The pair are real thrifters—in the pre-Juicy years, both spent their days doctoring $6 sundresses from L.A's Jet Rag—with no particular interest in collectible designer pieces. A trip to Didier Ludot, Paris's premier boutique for vintage couture, leaves both cold. “Six thousand dollars for a YSL coat from the seventies?” sniffs Pam as she tears out of the cramped treasure trove. “I'm sorry, but I wasn't born yesterday.”
The Dior show, however, brings out childlike awe and gratitude. They sit stunned as wondrous creations—a cross between My Fair Lady and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—float by like blow-ups at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Afterward, it's backstage to meet their idol John Galliano. As he snatches the gift they have come bearing (a smoke-colored monogrammed tracksuit), he delightedly volunteers that he wore their tobacco track pants every day when designing the collection. Daphne Guinness, one of England's richest and most stylish young things, grabs the Juicys and urgently declares, “I love the cashmeres.” Then Brittany Murphy, who's also backstage, not only screams, “Oh, I love Juicy!” but is actually wearing Juicy (black turtleneck sweater). Think about it: The Juicys don't just dress the couturier himself, they also dress his front row.
To get in the mood for Valentino, Pam and Gela go shopping at the Valentino boutique. Within minutes of having fitted them in tweed lady coats with fur collars, the snooty-looking staff is completely smitten. It's Legally Blonde meets “Bonjour, Paris.” Nobody can resist the joie de vivre and curiosity and energy that infuse almost their every move. Gela asks the lab-coated tailoress whether she has ever lived in Los Angeles; it turned out that she has, and soon the two are swapping breath mints and tales of Beverly Hills. Despite their success, the Juicys are utterly free of snobbery, and utterly unspoiled in their enthusiasm for all things fun, colorful, and new. Pam emerges from the fitting room with a feathered skirt pulled up over her chest and her pants down at her knees. “Do I look like Big Bird's child, Little Egg?” To which Gela says, “Pammy, you've got way too much going on there.”
Whatever excesses of fluffiness the two might indulge in, there is nothing fluffy about their work ethic. When they started off, Pam was a milliner who made press-worthy but unsellable hats, and Gela was a pregnant actress living in a one-bedroom apartment with her first husband, the musician Chris Nash. The two—who met while helping their friend Tracey Ross at a shop—collaborated on a line of maternity jeans and shirts called Travis (for Gela's now-teenage son). They got out of the maternity racket after a catsuit they designed in red, white, and blue was recolored by a chain of stores in yellow, tangerine, and lime-green (“hot dog on a stick,” recalls Pam). The ugliness was too much to handle—“It was our biggest order; that was it, we had to get out,” says Gela. Seven years ago, they started Juicy Couture, to make the clothes they wanted in their closets but couldn't find anywhere else: a non-vulgar scoop-necked T-shirt (Pam is a 32 D), a saucy tennis skirt, jeans that fit skinny curves. They had $200, Gela's apartment, and a cleaning woman to help with the shipping (she now runs their warehouses). “My single girlfriends always ask me how to start a business,” Gela says. “Men tell them they have to go to a bank, do a business plan, borrow $60,000 to $100,000. If I'd started a business $60,000 in debt, I wouldn't have been able to get up in the morning. We learned from our experiences, and we were lucky.” “We weren't lucky,” Pam says. “We worked our asses off.”
Later that night, backstage at Valentino (we've arrived too late to take our seats), the Juicys observe appreciatively as the perpetually tan team from Rome work their asses off to send out Hollywood goddess gowns in silver charmeuse and va-va red taffeta. The moment the models return from the catwalk, they are transformed from unearthly glamazons to scrawny teenagers with hair extensions who jump to it when yelled at by grown-ups. The Juicys are entranced—by the clothes, the chaos, the girls. When they get to meet the maestro afterward, Valentino air kisses them while staring into the distance with jet-set, has-anybody-seen-my-yacht? distractedness. “He wasn't that happy to see us,” sighs Pam, defensively pulling her fur-trimmed Valentino cashmere cardigan over her chocolate Juicy velour track pants. But later on, at a dinner thrown by Valentino's business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, at his Rothko-and Twombly-infested apartment, the Juicys couldn't be made to feel more welcome. Ashley Judd announces to all in earshot, “I love Juicy,” and impossibly rich Euro-babes keep introducing themselves in the hope of getting their hands on some cashmere. Valentino and Giancarlo and Carlos Souza (the impossibly glamorous Brazilian head of PR) are given monogrammed Juicy and have to be dissuaded from tearing their clothes off and suiting up there and then. At midnight, Souza leans over to the Juicys and whispers, “So tell me, how much volume do you really do?”
The Juicys don't give up the facts and figures, but the answer is clearly a lot. A whole lot. When I call Kal Ruttenstein of Bloomingdale's, he tells me that by volume, Juicy Couture is the biggest brand they carry—bigger than Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Sean John. Their old pal Tracey Ross, who now owns Tracey Ross in L.A., says she gets a box of it every week and it never hits the floor. At Scoop, it's the number-one line. “It's a cult,” screams Stefanie Greenfield. “It's mother-daughter-grandmother. We're selling drawstring pants and fleece hoodies to men, too. And with Juicy Kids, you now have Juicy families. It's insane.” When I mention Juicy to Gail Pisano of Saks, she simply says, “It's crazy. It's out of control.”
What makes Juicy special is that, although the clothes are not fashion, they are the perfect complement to fashion. They are worn by, and made by, women who follow the trends, the couture, the whole deal, and who know the difference between a silhouette or fabric that works, and one that just gets you by. The Juicys have a clear-eyed perspective on what they do—and all the clearer after their magical Parisian excursion.
“When I think of 1,200 hours of work to make one dress,” Gela sighs, after the Chanel show, “and we can sell 80,000 units of one model. . . .” Pam finishes her thought: “There's nothing couture about Juicy Couture.”
But what is also clear, as the week goes by, is that these two designers are as perceptive as any observer about what's interesting and right and new. “There are three pink stories,” Pam remarks at one point, “the dusty rose at Chanel, the fuchsia at Gaultier, and the cotton candy at Dior.” And she's dead-on, and way ahead of the pack. The Juicys are not enthusiastic for the hell of it. About Laurent Mercier's couture debut at Balmain, Gela says, apropos of the visible panty lines, “We don't let anything out of our sample room that fits like that.” (“Was it the Smile?” asks Pam, who wasn't there. “It was everything,” Gela says.) On exiting Givenchy, held at the former Romanian embassy, Gela says, about a metal-adorned pantsuit: “Christina Aguilera.” “That's low,” says Pam gleefully. Ungaro gets mixed reviews—beautiful fabrics but questionable silhouettes, and not for them the cigarette motif: Gela quit smoking two years ago by hypnosis (her hypnotist also did the Sex Pistols' Steve Jones), and the duo are horrified by the puffing Frenchies everywhere.
After Lacroix—their favorite show—the Juicys once again measure the distance between their designs and that which they have just seen. “Sometimes we get an idea that involves handwork,” says Gela, “but when we try to make it work for our world, it's just not worth it.” “To stay at our price point,” says Pam, “we'd have to compromise on quality and use polyester ribbon and cheap sequins.” But the Juicys are actively considering doing a more elaborate line, perhaps even showing at the New York collections. If they decide to go down this road, we should watch carefully. The questions they ask—What's not in my closet? What do I need to look new and different and ready to live my life?—are exactly those that Donna Karan asked herself back in the day. If, on the other hand, they choose to stay put in Pacoima, and never play the fashion game, it's possible that their influence will be even greater. The time may have come when Seventh Avenue's lofty vantage point suddenly seems less relevant than the ground-level perspective of the designer as consumer. Maybe, in a high-low style culture, all a girl really needs is one piece of real couture and a hell of a lot of Juicy Couture. If you can get your hands on any of it, that is.