Don’t I know your face from somewhere?

Fashion’s enduring love of celebrity has recently found expression in a new guise — the rise of celebrity children as models and brand ambassadors.

Flick the pages of any glossy and you’ll see many beautiful faces that have a nagging familiarity — the pouty lips and tumbling blond mane of that Bardotesque blonde in the Hudson jeans adverts, the olive skin and liquid brown eyes of that girl who’s the face of Forever 21 and the elegant expressive face of the model in the Lancome Hydra Zen campaign. Why do all these beauties strike a chord? It’s all down to their celebrity DNA — the Hudson girl is Georgia May Jagger (parents Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall), the Forever 21 ambassador is Amber Le Bon (parents Simon and Amber le Bon) and the Lancome model is Elettra Rossellini Wiedemann (daughter of Isabella Rossellini and grand-daughter of Ingrid Bergman).

In the midst of the biggest financial meltdown in living memory, advertisers and brands are looking for faces that will not only sell their product but also seduce consumers with glamour, excitement and a famous pedigree to boot. In a marketplace crammed with product, standing out from the rest has become a survival skill. A beautiful face is now no longer enough to convince consumers to part with their ever-diminishing disposable income — there has to be an extra dimension, the celebrity X factor, if you like. Witness the plethora of A-list actresses now promoting fashion brands and beauty products — the pages of Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire are crammed with talented thespians who a decade ago would have snubbed such endorsements as detrimental to their artistic credibility. Now that advertising is no longer seen as compromising, celebrities are not only happy to lend their fame and beauty to brands for a considerable fee, their offspring are looking for a piece of the pie too.