See and be scene

THE spotlight of L.A.’s red carpet is giving way to a new ego-stroking, status-bestowing institution: the fashion show front row.

Being seated closest to the runway is more than a thank you to supporters; it’s also a reflection of the designer’s pull and the collection’s cool factor. “The audience can be as interesting as the show,” said Margaret Schell, a partner with SPR, a fashion public relations firm in Hollywood that has staged Los Angeles shows for five years.

Indeed, a good 40 minutes before the first model strutted the Louis Verdad runway Sunday at Smashbox Studios, a group of head-turning guests assembled in the 89 front-row seats. A quick pan of the row skipped from the usual glitterati like Paris and Nicky Hilton to rock ‘n’ roll stars such as Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Gilby Clarke, the Guns ‘N Roses guitarist, with his wife, Daniella, founder of Frankie B. jeans. Matthew Perry, talking up his new TV show, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” took along pal Randall Slavin, a celebrity photographer.

In a brightly colored grouping of Verdad-wearing beauties there were Carmen Electra; Rachael Leigh Cook and her high school friend, writer Jackie Honikman; and up-and-coming singer Katy Perry. Across the runway, costume designer Susan Matheson wore a bowler and a corset, though she swore she wasn’t trying to mimic the show’s corset theme.

Look left and Tropicana Bar proprietress Amanda Scheer Demme was shielding her eyes under an old-fashioned men’s straw hat. Across the runway the bejeweled woman with flamingo-pink hair was accessory designer Tarina Tarantino. Looking annoyed near the photographer’s pit sat an unsmiling blond matron (“Isn’t she somebody?”) holding a nervous Chihuahua that sniffed Steven Cojocaru, the former “Today” correspondent.

But how to get the A-listers to attend?

In other cities, organizers must lure celebrities with first-class plane tickets, professional hair and makeup services, free lodging and the designer’s clothes. All it takes in L.A., where so many celebrities live, said Kelly Cutrone, founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion public relations firm, is an invitation. Except when it doesn’t.

In the land of the months-long red carpet season, celebrities are so accustomed to receiving free clothes in exchange for an appearance that designers have had to up the ante.

“A lot of times we’ll send them pairs of customized jeans or an invitation to shop at the store,” said Kenn Henman, a publicist with aLine Media. His agency arranged the seating this season for premium denim makers Antik Denim, Taverniti and Yanuk. To cement relationships with hoped-for stars, the company months ago brought Eva Longoria and Nicollette Sheridan to the Antik store on Melrose, and “they had a little shopping spree.” The agency has also added a limo and stylist to the list of incentives. Paris Hilton said she had been promised Louis Verdad’s entire line.

“From a celebrity perspective, L.A. is amazing,” Cutrone said. “It is better than anywhere in the world. The potential of the front row is huge.”

The front row as an institution is a relatively new phenomenon in L.A. But as fashion here gains in sophistication, its profile is rising.

“There’s a who’s who of celebrities and press and VIPs,” said Sara Stein, co-founder of SPR. The modern front-row concept came to L.A. in November 2001, when she and Schell launched Audi Presents Designer Collections Los Angeles, for which sponsor JetBlue flew New York fashion editors to L.A. “At that time, there was a very small front row,” Stein said. It’s bigger and more badly behaved now.

Stories of seat crashers and front-row poseurs have grown common. But Cutrone applies a three-second rule, after which she gets tough.

“When someone has to start running down their CV to me, then it’s, ‘No. Good luck, hate me later and never come to anything I do again,’ ” Cutrone said. And if you’re rude, consider yourself lucky if you don’t get banished forever, or worse, stuck standing.

When the city’s design legions joined with marketing giant IMG in 2004 to create the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Smashbox Studios, they also assumed the protocol that governs fashion shows around the world. The experimental, friendly and sometimes amateur presentations that once defined an L.A. fashion show have been replaced by professional, staged events that are structured, serious and slick marketing vehicles for the clothes, and in this town, the ever-changing audience.

The show producers are beginning to understand L.A. at about the same rate that L.A. is beginning to understand professional fashion, which is shaping the front row.

“A lot of publicists are registered on our list” in Los Angeles, said IMG Vice President Fern Mallis. “We never register publicists in New York. We were educated that publicists are people hired by studios and actresses, and they call in clothes for them to wear at events. Sometimes having an actress wear your dress is more important than having Neiman Marcus in the front row.”

Los Angeles shows are exciting because each designer has a distinct set of famous friends. And each season the show roster changes almost completely, broadening the fashion-fame field. In New York and the international circuit, year after year, those top seats are filled with dozens of the usual suspects from retailing and the media. They’re powerful, but boring.

“What we’re looking for is two or three A-list people we could group together in a seating. We are looking for that one snapshot,” Henman said.

Designers give clothes to beautiful stars to boost their brand’s profile and, to help ensure she looks the part, they often also give footwear.

“Here you have a mosh pit of all kinds of shoes,” said Schell. Where New York front-row feet sport designer heels, L.A. skips from scuffed trainers to cowboy boots to vintage pumps.

Shoes, said Schell, “speak volumes about what sets the two worlds apart. New York is the fashion capital of America and always will be. L.A. projects a lifestyle direction across the world. Just a few years ago, L.A.’s look permeated the whole world with tracksuits, trainers and hairdos. But in New York, fashion is very serious business.”

New York, London, Paris and Milan also have the support infrastructure that can fill a fashion show with the people who have the power to make or break your brand. They control the booth placement at trade shows; the prominence of your wares in the store, display window and ad campaign; and the length of feature stories and editorials in their publications. The Los Angeles versions of those people haven’t asserted their power, not yet, and they may not even be here in meaningful numbers.

“There aren’t enough front-row people [in L.A.] to fill up what we would call a valid front row in a Paris or a New York show,” said Cutrone, whose PR firm stages shows internationally. She said that maybe a half-dozen magazines matter in L.A.; even then, those who attend shows here are figureheads who, in New York, would sit behind their masthead superiors -- in the third row.

Still, the L.A. organizers issue invitations to the West Coast bureaus of Elle, Allure, Glamour, Lucky, In Style and Vogue, and to lifestyle magazines such as Los Angeles, Flaunt, Angelino, LA Confidential and C.

Unlike the New York shows, however, the celebrity tabloids are bigger players, with US Weekly, inTouch Weekly, OK!, Hello and Star front and center.

Retailers are also up front, such as quasi-celebrities Tracey Ross, Shauna Stein of On Sunset and Lisa Kline. The Robertson Boulevard boutique, Kitson, said Cutrone, isn’t important for fashion, but buyers from local boutiques such as Maxfield, H. Lorenzo and Traffic may also get the coveted “Row 1” on their invitations.

Celebrity stylists may fill out the front row, including Rachel Zoe, Jessica Paster, Daniel Caudill, Tod Hallman and Kate Young, Deborah Waknin and Maryam Malakpour. Notable costume designers for TV and film make the cut, including “Walk the Line’s” Arianne Phillips, “Legally Blonde 2’s” Sophie de Rakoff Carbonelle and Catherine Adair of “Desperate Housewives.”

The missing elements are the old-money socialites and top brass retailers, though Michael Fink, the fashion director for Saks Fifth Avenue, will visit an important client, such as Sue Wong. In their place are second-generation Hollywood royalty, the children of producers such as Jon Peters and Aaron Spelling.

Entertainers may show up, even if they don’t have a new project to promote. Yet this season, publicists for Kevan Hall invited stars who will need new wardrobes for movie premieres or album releases in the fall -- the same time his glamorous clothes will hit stores.

At Hall’s show, actress Olivia Wilde, who appeared on “The O.C.,” was hoping to find that perfect something for the fall premiere of her movie “Alpha Dog.” And if the paparazzi happened to snap her picture a few million times, all the better.

“When you think what an ad campaign costs in something like Vogue,” Hall said, “aligning yourself with a celebrity at your fashion show is a great way to build your brand.” Those photos span the globe almost instantly.

“The front-row celebrity fashion shot is absolutely a commodity,” said Steve Granitz, a founder of WireImage, a Los Angeles-based celebrity photo agency. The 5-year-old company’s website devotes large, easy-to-find sections to photos of stars at fashion shows around the world.

The images sell, he said, because people “want to see what’s the [latest] handbag, the latest hairdo, the kind of pants they’re wearing. That’s why we are out there. They want to see a day in the life of a celebrity.”