Parenting & Family Quote by Carrie Donovan

“Fashion is entertainment” is a neat little grenade tossed into the middle of an industry that loves to dress itself up as art, craft, or cultural necessity. Carrie Donovan, an editor who understood both the gloss and the machinery, strips the whole thing down to its real operating principle: attention. Fashion doesn’t just sell clothes; it sells a running storyline with characters, plot twists, and a weekly cliffhanger. That framing explains the kid fascination she points to: children are natural consumers of spectacle and celebrity narrative, long before they’re consumers of couture.

The bite is in her casual “whoever we’ve declared the new one this afternoon.” It’s funny because it’s true, and it’s sharp because it indicts the gatekeepers. Donovan isn’t blaming kids for being captivated by Naomi and Christy; she’s exposing how quickly the industry manufactures “the new one,” as if canonization is a newsroom decision rather than a cultural achievement. The phrase “declared” turns fashion authority into something almost governmental - arbitrary, top-down, performed.

Context matters: she’s speaking from the late 20th-century moment when “supermodels” became global brands, and magazine editors, photographers, and designers operated as tastemakers with real power. Donovan’s subtext is that the runway and the editorial page aren’t mirrors of public taste so much as engines that generate it. Fashion, in her view, isn’t frivolous because it’s entertainment; it’s consequential precisely because entertainment is how culture trains desire.