Legendary designer opts to stay classy
FASHION: Trends that are ‘cool’ or ‘naked’ a turnoff for Herrera
NEW YORK — Designer Carolina Herrera, wearing a well-tailored, cream-coloured dress and a bouquet of lavender brooches, strides into her office on Seventh Avenue with the elongated posture of a dancer.
She has fresh-from-the-salon hair that belies the day’s spitting rain.
She wears a discreet hint of lipstick. She looks pristine, unhurried and genteel.
There are a lot of designers who choose bland attire — T-shirts and jeans, basic black jersey — as a kind of camouflage. They don’t want to distract from the glory of their collection.
Herrera serves as a template, a role model, for the woman who buys her clothes — or at least whom that woman aspires to be.
Herrera maintains a sharp eye for the details that can spoil a look: the stray hair, a skirt that wrinkles across the hips, the bodice that strains against its buttons.
Her style is not fussy or old-fashioned, but it is formal. It is considered. Herrera, after all, believes that every woman should own a dress, a pencil skirt and an evening gown.
Herrera’s style stands out in our aggressively informal times.
To attend a runway show for her signature collection is to be swept into a room filled with social swells, wealthy shoppers and ladies with foreign accents and terribly convoluted names suggesting nobility somewhere in the upper branches of their family tree.
This is the world out of which Herrera herself emerged, more than 30 years ago, at the age of 40, to launch her own ready-to-wear collection.
She was born into wealth in Venezuela and married into Spanish nobility.
Over the years, she has built a Seventh Avenue-based company that includes her signature line, epitomized by the elegant evening dresses that appear regularly at red carpet occasions, as well as fragrances, bridal gowns and a secondary collection, CH.
Herrera, 76, has succeeded in the fashion industry by refraining from chasing cool.
She does not aspire to be hip or edgy. “If you are a designer who is born hip and cool, then fine, you can do it. But I don’t understand a designer who sees hip and cool (young designers) and they want to be like the newcomers. You confuse the client,” she says.
Herrera aspires to be something more subtle: contemporary, something her four daughters help her with by wearing her classic dresses in such disparate ways.
Contemporary is also a mantra she shared with her friend, the late designer Oscar de la Renta.
“He always (did) the same silhouette for his designs, but with a modern twist,” she says.
Jaws need not drop for Herrera to declare a collection a success.
In fact, she is disappointed by fashion’s current version of one-upsmanship: the idea that modern is synonymous with show-your-tush.
Some designers think, “it’s so modern to be naked or almost naked. They think it’s going to attract younger people if they do those dresses. No!” Herrera says emphatically.
“The almost naked! Oh God! They’re trying to get people to pay attention to them. In life, there should be a little mystery.”
Herrera turns to the recent Costume Institute gala to make her point. Exhibits A through C: Beyoncé and her bedazzled mosquito netting; Jennifer Lopez in a red beaded gown that was all front and back and no sides; Kim Kardashian with a train of white feathers trailing from a derrière served up for admiration.
“They’re supposed to be fashion icons and they’re not wearing anything,” a dismayed Herrera says.