The Budget Babe | Affordable Fashion & Style Blog

What makes a style icon?

Style icon. We hear the term thrown around so loosely these days. It would seem as though a true style icon could only come along once in a blue moon, and yet, everyone from Jessica Simpson to J.Lo seems to have garnered the title.

I could continue my litany of complaints about the misuse of this term that should be reserved for individuals who truly embody style, but I highly doubt the people at Extra will take heed. Yet we the people should at least be able to come to some reasonable consensus. What then, is a style icon?

According to some flogs, you have to be a designer or a stylist to be a style icon. I beg to differ. Case in point: Jackie O. To the best of my knowledge, she was not a schooled fashion designer, professional stylist, skilled seamstress, etc. Heck, I doubt she ever did a load of laundry. And yet, she embodied elegance, refinement, beauty and exuded femininity in a manner that made her public take notice and crown her style icon. Who can argue that?

Nevertheless, such was the case against Sarah Jessica Parker as style icon, which I discovered while reading flogs where naysayers bashed her decision to create a clothing line for Steve & Barry's, saying that she's not qualified and that she's no style icon. Rather, they suggest she owes every iota of style to her stylist, Patricia Fields.

To that, I say, you must not truly understand style, because if you did, you would know that it's 1% what you wear and 99% how you wear it. (I made up those percentages just now for dramatic effect.) But my point is this: a style icon does not have to be a fashion designer. Style is born based on the way someone pulls off a look, the way they make it their own, the way they make others believe in the style. And SJP did just that. She embodied the cultural and artistic ethos of a Certain Type of Woman in New York City at a Certain Time, and she did it so well we couldn't avert our eyes. We wanted more. We wanted to look like her, even if it just meant wearing a pair of 5 inch stilettos around our own apartment.

And so I've concluded that to me, a style icon is someone lauded by both the public AND the fashion world as being representative of the zeigeist, primarily through their clothing and attitude. And they are rare.

Of course I respect Patricia Fields, and admire her for dressing SJP, but one could not have thrived without the other. And as luck would have it, SJP happened to be the one in front of the cameras, the one who could act, and the one who therefore became the visible "style icon."

I'm certainly not saying everyone with a great stylist is a style icon. Almost every celebrity today has a stylist behind them, and we're not fooled nor are we impressed nor do we give the star credit for their carefully fabricated "good taste." I just don't think you can separate out the fact that SJP wasn't just another star—she was at the center of an influential, pop culture phenomena, and as such, she legitimately made her way into the ranks of style icon.

Now, as far as who should be permitted to design clothes, I'm not making any hard and fast rules here. Obviously, you don't have to be a style icon to design clothes (or at least that should be obvious. All designers have to start somewhere.)

The fact is that the celeb-cum-fashion designer set is here to stay because, as much as it pains me to admit this, not everyone takes their fashion cues from top designers. Sad, we know, but true. Some people do look to J.Lo and Jessica Simpson, so naturally, businesses are going to capitalize on that. While I've been tempted to buy a J.Lo hoody at Marshall's more than once, I've resisted on principal. But if SJP does a line of clothes, I'll be interested because I see her in a--dare I say--different league.

Maybe I am just fooling myself. Maybe without Patricia Field's helping her out, the line with be a disaster. But I'm keeping my mind open…afterall, if Jackie O. had come out with a line of clothes, we would have been all over it.
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