Brooks Shields latest celebrity to join forces with QVC
NEW YORK — Brooke Shields drew herself up to her full 6 feet, fielding reporters’ questions with an agility that has become second nature.
At the Beekman Hotel in downtown Manhattan earlier this year, Shields — the model, actress and veteran of countless interviews — was delivering but the latest in a series of canny performances. She bantered good-naturedly, displaying an unflappable poise. She was dressed in a closefitting top and skirt from the collection she was about to unveil for QVC.
At 52, Shields — after transitioning through the decades from wide-eyed innocent to self-mocking glamorista in TV shows such as “Suddenly Susan” and “Friends” — has ripened into the kind of consummately relatable personality much coveted by QVC, the homeshopping behemoth that found success with Iman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and other celebrities.
Shields’ history is part of the draw.
On-screen and on the page, she has been a continual presence in the lives of her fans: a comedic talent and the author of several viscerally revealing memoirs in which she cast herself as a survivor, beating back demons that include a codependent relationship with an alcoholic mother and a severe episode of postpartum depression.
As Rachel Ungaro, vice president for fashion merchandising and design development for QVC, said, “She transcends the decades” — fixed firmly in home viewers’ imaginations as paradoxically tough and alluring but approachable.
Unlike many other models over 50 or performers parlaying their celebrity into late-life fashion careers — Jaclyn Smith and Marlo Thomas come to mind — Shields has never put her name to a fashion line.
Still, the QVC partnership seems promising.
Her new label, Brooke Brooke Shields, modeling pieces in her apparel and accessories line created for QVC
Shields Timeless, launched this month. It is trend-free, aimed unabashedly at the “menocore” crowd.
Members of the QVC demographic (ages 35 to 65) might recall Shields as the paradoxically chaste pinup who courted notoriety playing a preadolescent prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 film “Pretty Baby.” They might also remember her as the demiclad nymph cavorting on a desert island in “The Blue Lagoon” (1980).
“I think in my life I’ve really embodied both the sexy and the wholesome,” said Shields, a tutor’s pet on her early movie locations who eventually attended Princeton University.
Days after introducing the QVC line, she gusted into Maison Kayser, a West Village bakery near the town house she shares with her
husband, Chris Henchy, a TV writer and producer, and their two daughters, ages 11 and 14. Seasoning her eggs with a vial of Tabasco she produced from her purse, she was reflective.
“At the end of the day, you’re sort of asking yourself, ‘Who am I?’ “she said. “Am I honestly OK with being more than just one thing?”
And yet her variability is arguably what has extended her appeal. Recurrent gossip column fodder, the youthful Shields dated John Travolta and crushed on a baby-faced George Michael. Later in life, she found herself deflecting the advances of Donald Trump, who had suggested that they date, telling her, as she amusedly told talk show host Andy Cohen, “’You’re America’s sweetheart, and
I’m America’s richest man.”’
She was briefly married to tennis pro Andre Agassi, who portrayed her in “Open,” his 2009 autobiography, as a socially ambitious gadabout to his off-the-court homebody. They were a mismatch, not least because, as he writes, when friends appear, “It feels as if we’re actors and our guests are an audience.”
In her 2014 memoir, “There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me,” Shields confides that she pulled away from Agassi by degrees, their rift widening after she learned of his former substance abuse.
“I feared our life together was not based in absolute truth,” she writes.
Throughout her marriage and well into Shields’ adulthood, Teri Shields, her notorious hovercraft of a mother, was both her bulwark and her bane. Energetic and capable but often drunk, the senior Shields is portrayed in her daughter’s memoir with an unlikely blend of solicitude and pain. (Teri died in 2012.)
Over the course of her somewhat-patchy upbringing, Shields acquired a robust armor. Teri Shields spent part of her girlhood in Newark New Jersey, cleaning other people’s houses. Divorced when Brooke was a toddler from Frank Shields, a well-born and glamorous business executive, she and Brooke spent summers in Southhampton, New York, in a relatively shabby part of town, so that Brooke could see her father.
The QVC collection, priced from $29 to $109, veers in tone and style from classically upscale to breezily accessible.
Yet even simply getting dressed has sometimes proved a challenge for Shields.
“I was afraid that I didn’t have a ‘through line’ to my style,” she said, noting that she struggled to make sense of her 50-plus pairs of jeans and more rarely worn high-end togs from labels including Carolina Herrera, Rodarte and Saint Laurent.
“I had nice things, but I was afraid I was going to sweat in them and spoil them,” she said.
Instead of picking up fancy labels, she said, “I would buy 10 identical pieces from Uniqlo.”
More pointedly, she said, “I didn’t want to seem better than anyone else.”
Her egalitarian tendencies have given rise to a collection of discreetly striped shirts, tank tops with jeweled necklines, trench jackets, tunics and wide-leg pants, a wardrobe that highlights and simultaneously downplays wealth and class.
When she isn’t overseeing the placement of zippers, buttons and seams, Shields is shuttling between New York and Los Angeles, where she tapes “Jane the Virgin,” parodying herself as an actress and supermodel called River Fields.
Offset, though, she plans to stay sharply focused on Brooke, the brand.
“At first I shied away from that,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a commodity. I wanted to be real. But the flip side was that I wanted to sell. And you can’t have it both ways.”