Are There Too Many Celebrity Brand Ambassadors?

Photo-Illustration: Tracy Ma; Photos: ©Rosie Marks for Louis Vuitton, Mert Alas

A little over a decade ago, Anne Hathaway’spublic persona was in crisis. She had starred in The Princess Diaries and won an Oscar for Les Misérables but was far from being the stylish star of The Devil Wears Prada 2, the most talked-about film in fashion these days. Audiences found her grating, a try-hard theater kid. The internet piled on when she was cast as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises because she wasn’t considered sexy enough. Caustic think pieces speculated about why she was so despised.

Then, in 2019, Hathaway met Erin Walsh. A sought-after stylist, Walsh rose from a fashion assistant at Vogue to dressing everyone from Sarah Jessica Parker to Timothée Chalamet. Her client Kerry Washington has suggested that her red-carpet revamp elevated her professional profile. Walsh felt she could be useful to Hathaway, too. The actress started taking some risks, showing more skin, and not just for premieres but in her off-duty wardrobe. In short order, she became the face of the jewelry house Bulgari, and in 2022, she went viral by re-creating a look from The Devil Wears Prada and sitting next to Anna Wintour at a Michael Kors show.

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Around then, Walsh was chatting with an executive at Versace who shared that the brand was seeking a new “face.” “Well, why wouldn’t you talk to Annie?” Walsh recalls saying. The executive was intrigued. Andy Sachs for Versace? The maker of leather, latex, and chain mail once represented by Madonna? The label that helped invent the supermodel? “It’s like the chicken-or-the-egg thing with Annie,” Walsh says now. “Was she a Versace sexy person first? Yes. I always saw that in her. Was it a reality yet? No.” In the brand’s 2023 ads, Hathaway is stripped down, her face bare and hair tousled. She wears a leather bustier in one, a minidress and kitten heels in another. “She’s a little bit dangerous. Dangerous but sexy,” Donatella Versace says in one video. Hathaway’s transformation was complete.

“Fashion,” Walsh says, “is not just about telling the story of who you are but who you want to project. Especially for people who are in the spotlight in this very big way, it’s a means of manifestation.” The Hathaway deal was worth it for a Versace in pursuit of its own rebrand. “We were looking for someone who wasn’t the obvious choice,” says a former high-level employee who worked at the company then. “No one’s lining up for Anne Hathaway’s black blazer, but what she did for us was say, ‘Versace is not just for the super-sexy woman.’”

No one’s writing essays mocking Hathaway anymore. While she was filming The Devil Wears Prada sequel over the summer, paparazzi pictures of the actress in character wearing an array of designer labels were dissected by fans and the fashion cognoscenti. Brands can gauge in real time the reach of images of Hathaway in their clothes and handbags — Gabriela Hearst racked up $1.4 million in media exposure when the label’s designs appeared on set, and Chanel came in second with $1.2 million, according to the data-analytics firm Launchmetrics. It’s all a bit of a dress rehearsal for Hathaway’s next fashion ambassadorship, a role that could easily pay her millions on top of her acting work. By the time the film comes out, she’ll have her pick of the crop. “She’s only going to do something completely out of integrity,” says Walsh.

Fashion and Hollywood have been in bed since filmmaking’s golden age, when Salvatore Ferragamo was the shoemaker to the likes of Jean Harlow and Greta Garbo. In recent years, the relationship has intensified into a cutthroat, overheated, and highly competitive cottage industry for designers, actors, and the coterie of professionals who drive this $7.1 billion shadow economy. Like foreign powers jostling for territory, theirs is a delicate diplomacy that has taken on new urgency amid a global luxury slowdown and designer turnover at the top of the major European houses. When these creative directors make their debuts with the spring 2026 collections in September and October, the map may be entirely redrawn.

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Did They Make You Shop?

The most influential brand ambassadors in the world, ranked by the media value of their 2024 campaigns.

Source: Launchmetrics

With reputational risk and fortunes on the line, celebrities are weighing their next steps carefully. “We get offers all the time,” says commercial agent Todd Shemarya, who works with Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Reese Witherspoon on endorsement deals. “With everyone I represent, I’m always talking to them and their management about what’s right for their image. Everything is about image. Brad is luxury. We only do stuff that stays in that lane.”

For actors, shilling was once seen as a cheap money grab, a gig they took overseas to secretly hawk canned coffee or ramen noodles. Now, it’s a savvy career move as film and TV studios tighten budgets, production slumps, and streaming residuals dry up. Fashion is just one component of their earning portfolio, and the paychecks have only gotten bigger and bigger. In 2012, Pitt got paid a reported $7 million to be the first male face of Chanel No. 5. A little over a decade later, Chanel was said to have paid Chalamet $35 million for a campaign that included a minute-and-a-half-long perfume spot directed by Martin Scorsese.

The financial terms of these arrangements are rarely confirmed, but they range from thousands of dollars to tens of millions depending on star power, commercial deliverables, contract length, and product category — beauty, jewelry, accessories, or fashion. At the top of the pyramid are the boldface names; at the bottom are a phalanx of influencers and one-off hired guns. The broader the scope of work (appearances, social-media posts, exclusivity clauses), the larger the reward.

Sometimes the paycheck isn’t the point but a means to an end. A few years ago, Iris Law, daughter of the actor Jude Law, appeared in her first Versace ad. “She didn’t care that it was a summer campaign,” says the former high-level employee at the brand. “She got paid very little and then she turned it around and got other jobs.” Campaigns for Adidas, Burberry, and David Yurman followed. “Vuitton pays way more than Versace ever pays,” the employee continues, but “people beg to do Versace.”

Actors and influencers such as Hathaway and Law, advised by their teams, often follow a similar game plan: Start with an attention-grabbing campaign, establish proof of concept, graduate to the big leagues. In June 2019, Jacob Elordi was a largely unknown Australian actor featured in Euphoria. By August, he was posing in a pair of boxer briefs, bare-chested and hair wet, trending alongside the hashtag #MyCalvins. Later, he was photographed carrying Bottega Veneta handbags, and by 2024 he had his own Bottega campaign. Evan Mock got his own Calvin Klein billboard in Soho in 2021, just as the Gossip Girl reboot was streaming; he is now an ambassador for Saint Laurent. Aaron Taylor-Johnson slipped into his Calvins in 2023 and the next year traded up for Armani with a fragrance campaign, then Saint Laurent for its winter 2025 campaign.

“Calvin Klein underwear is more of an image campaign than anything. You’re doing that to bring awareness to the talent,” says Shemarya, who is also Taylor-Johnson’s agent. “The campaigns are beautiful, and they’re massive as far as exposure.”

By now, Calvin knows to ride this wave. Jonathan Bottomley, its global chief marketing officer, was early to recognize the heartthrob potential of Jeremy Allen White, the lead on The Bear. In January 2024, he ran ads that presented White “to the world in a way that no one else has previously seen, in a way that we can own and claim. It looks like Calvin, it feels like Calvin,” Bottomley says. On a New York rooftop, White is seen lounging on a sofa in cotton boxer briefs and flexing for the camera. The next year, he was wearing Louis Vuitton to the SAG Awards, and four months later, he was formally announced as a Vuitton house ambassador, with men’s creative director Pharrell Williams praising an “authenticity that you can’t fake.”

The partnership worked out well for all. CMOs often look to media-impact value or earned-media value, metrics that estimate in dollars a campaign’s reach in the press and social media. Bottomley says White’s was worth “eight or nine times” what the company spent on it, generating more than $12 million in media exposure in the first 48 hours and reaching more than 40 million users on Instagram. “In the U.S. alone, week one of the campaign generated more than 30 percent growth in underwear versus last year,” Stefan Larsson, the CEO of Calvin Klein parent company PVH, said in an earnings call.

Some fashion brands don’t wait for Hollywood to come to them — they cultivate their own pipeline of talent. Chanel especially is well known for its long game, scouting talent early and nurturing the relationship. Its decadeslong affiliation with model Vanessa Paradis now continues with her daughter, Lily-Rose Depp, and it started working with Kristen Stewart after the Twilight films, when she was transitioning into more adult roles; both Depp and Stewart have been “friends of the house” for more than a decade.

Saint Laurent even has its own division to produce films, including last year’s Emilia Pérez, which featured costumes by its creative director, Anthony Vaccarello. He then dressed the film’s stars, including Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña, for the monthslong press-tour and awards-season marathon. During the 12 years he was creative director of Loewe, Jonathan Anderson developed a stable of celebrity ambassadors, such as Josh O’Connor and Taylor Russell, who would sit front row at his shows. Eventually, Anderson started moonlighting as a costume designer for the films of Luca Guadagnino, and his actors were then formally signed as Loewe ambassadors in a mutually advantageous bit of cross-promotion. When Anderson presented his debut menswear collection for Dior over the summer in Paris, several of those celebrities turned up to cheer him on. “He’s got a wicked eye for talent,” says Shemarya of Anderson, who invited the agent’s client Levi Alves McConaughey, Matthew’s son and a budding influencer, to attend the show and join Dior as an ambassador.

The courtship of a future brand ambassador generally begins with an invitation to a runway show. In Paris, a giant bouquet of flowers from Louis Castor may be waiting in the VIP suite at the Plaza Athénée or Le Meurice, along with a rack of options from the latest collection to wear to the parade of cocktails and dinners that surround the presentation. From there, the guest is observed. “How do they behave? Do they show up on time? Are they charming? Do they wear the clothing well?” says Sophie Roche Conti, who owns a boutique fashion-PR agency. “Then they might say, ‘Okay, we want to invite you to this other event. Would you mind doing an interview or two?’”

Around the same time his son Levi was in Paris, Matthew McConaughey sat front row at Jacquemus, a trendy brand that has featured Bad Bunny and Kendall Jenner in ads. Dressed in an angular cream jacket and black trousers, McConaughey was sandwiched between his wife, Camila Alves, and Gillian Anderson, who was next to Emma Roberts. All he had to do was smile, look good in the clothes, and indulge a rep for the brand when asked to mug for TikTok and say “All right, all right, all right.” The post got 2.2 million impressions. A campaign has yet to materialize, but that wasn’t the actor’s only goal. He hasn’t appeared in a luxury fashion ad since Dolce & Gabbana paid him in the high seven figures to help sell a perfume beginning in 2008. “It makes all the other fashion people aware that we are interested in the fashion space,” Shemarya says.

Unless costly exclusivity clauses are baked into an endorsement contract, celebrities are free to shill for as many brands as they wish, and some have done just that. But there are risks. “People don’t really want to believe that somebody’s being paid lots of money to try to fool them,” says Shemarya. “With someone who’s overexposed, you wonder, What brand does she really like?” For every Chalamet, there’s a Sydney Sweeney. Over the summer, she was everywhere, sipping Sydney’s Signature Fizz in a commercial for Baskin-Robbins, selling a collection of soap bars by Dr. Squatch named for her bathwater, and attending her latest premiere in an evening gown by Miu Miu, which had initially hired her in 2022 as an ambassador to reach Gen-Z shoppers after the success of Euphoria. Unlike Elordi, Sweeney was less selective in her brand partnerships and just this year appeared in spots for Samsung and something called HeyDude shoes.

Then, in late July, came an American Eagle denim commercial that, to some critics, sounded a lot like a racist dog whistle. How the discourse impacted the brands she associates with is an open question. But Miu Miu has not waded into the debate, and American Eagle saw its stock rise after conservative political figures rallied to Sweeney’s defense. Dior faced a similar quandary with Johnny Depp, the longtime spokesmodel for its fragrance Sauvage, the world’s best-selling scent. The partnership continued amid Amber Heard’s domestic- and sexual-abuse accusations against the actor, and in 2023, less than a year after Depp won his defamation lawsuit against her, his contract was renewed for a reported $20 million. “More than ever, Johnny Depp is the soul of Sauvage,” Dior said in a statement then.

A backlash may be the cost of doing business — as long as the marketing pays off. But there are signs the endorsement boom is reaching a saturation point. Last year, Zendaya, Anya Taylor-Joy, and White were the only full-time actors to crack the top-ten list of fashion-brand ambassadors ranked by Launchmetrics. Five of them, meanwhile, were K-pop stars, including the leader of the chart, Jisoo, a Dior ambassador whose MIV is estimated at $105 million. Not only do groups such as Blackpink and Stray Kids have exceptionally devoted fans, but those fans are willing to fork over cash to support them. K-pop “armies” crowdfund billboards celebrating their idols and travel to attend store appearances, where they also shop. “They basically do the job for you,” says a luxury-label marketer. “With the K-pop stars, it’s incredible to see. You get what you pay for.”

Celebrity dealmaking is active, and international names are still booking work. Nicole Kidman, a Balenciaga ambassador since 2022, is reportedly being courted by Chanel. Rihanna, the face of Dior’s fragrance J’adore, turned up on Anderson’s front row over the summer, suggesting the pairing will continue. But if the fall advertising campaigns are any indication, fashion brands are reverting to an old strategy: The supermodel is back. Claudia Schiffer, Kate Moss, and Amber Valletta are the faces of Donatella Versace’s final campaign for the label that bears her name, which has been sold to Prada. Schiffer is also posing for Balenciaga and Moss for Saint Laurent. Chanel, Dior, Prada, and Gucci all feature models in their ads. There’s the occasional Jenner in the mix and a handful of actresses with long-standing commitments, but the images are an acknowledgment, perhaps, that a famous person can do only so much to peddle handbags that have, of late, doubled in price. Or maybe, with all the upheaval in the industry this past year, it’s a moment of transition as designers settle into their roles. For Sam Shahid, the marketing guru and art director who led Calvin’s in-house ad department starting in the early 1980s, the break is a chance for a visual reset. Celebrities can always find purchase elsewhere, likely hyping an electric car or crypto. An original concept lasts longer.

“I look back at the Obsession ads we did,” Shahid says. “There’s one of a couple, totally naked, hooked together on a swing. That could not run today. The celebrities are not going to do that. The celebrity is just a celebrity. They put the name Anne Hathaway on the ads just so you know that’s her.”

Photo-Illustration (chart): Marc Piasecki/WireImage (Rosé, Zendaya); Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty (Jude Bellingham); Mert Alas (Jeremy Allen White); Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty (Rihanna, Anya Taylor-Joy); Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty (Enhypen); Jamie McCarthy/Getty (Stray Kids); Pascal Le Segretain/Getty (Jisoo)