Referring to Prada’s menswear show F/W 2012 and to the appearance of Willem Defoe, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as models, Eric Wilson asks: “Could real actors do better than professional models?”. Scholar Bärbel Sill argues that ”…stars personalize the clothes they are wearing in transferring elements of their star image to the clothes. Thus they have a capacity advertising the clothes which models on their own may not. Acting is fundamentally different to modelling, in that the model is unable to give the clothes they are wearing the same ‘character’ as a star does.”

For further reading: Sill, Bärbel. “Stardom and Fashion: on the Representation of Female Movie Stars and Their Fashion(able) Image in Magazines and Advertising Campaigns.” In Fashion as photograph: viewing and reviewing images of fashion, edited by Eugénie Shinkle, 127-140. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.