How 2 Berkeley students launched trend-setting fashion house.
Opening Ceremony revolutionizes fashion with its Berkeley-meets-N.Y. smarts.
The scene in New York on Sept. 13 at the spring 2016 Opening Ceremony fashion show was exactly what you’d expect from the 13-year-old concept store, clothing line and unofficial brand of downtown cool: Twenty-somethings with skateboards mixing with fashion executives, bloggers, celebrities and ‘It’ personalities.
When the doors to the show open, they reveal an edible garden of fig and lemon trees, herbs and veggie-producing plants. Geometric stained glass chandeliers and window panels complete the picture. The set was inspired by Cloverleaf, an unproduced utopian project by Frank Lloyd Wright. The architect’s motifs recur in the clothing, with stained glass patterns on the shoulders of tops, and relaxed-shape separates and one-piece garments mimicking the organic lines of Wright’s buildings.
The show begins and, suddenly, a model falls; a second model follows her. When a third, fourth and fifth all disrupt the show with tumbles we understand it’s a performance. It’s the kind of jarring runway moment that could only happen courtesy of Opening Ceremony — and it’s why the show remains one of the hottest tickets at New York Fashion Week. You never know what the house’s definition of “fashion show” will be from one season to the next.
Since founding Opening Ceremony (named for the Olympic pageant) in Manhattan’s SoHo in 2002 with just a few thousand dollars and a keen sense of the up-andcoming , CEO Carol Lim and creative director Humberto Leon, both 40, have blurred the boundaries of style, retail and culture.
Opening Ceremony has propelled both high-concept labels and fast-fashion companies into the cultural mainstream at their stores. It’s created capsule collections with everyone from Vivienne Westwood to Adidas, Topshop and even the Elvis Presley estate, giving new life to the idea. Its fashion shows have included plays at the Metropolitan Opera and art gallery shows with collaborator Spike Jonze. Last year it even ventured into wearables, launching a fash-tech bracelet with Intel.
But what Lim and Leon have really been able to export is an experience. From the beginning, their Howard Street store in New York was as much a gathering place as a retail spot. Artists, musicians and up-and-coming actors all gravitated toward the in-store parties, and you could easily run into OC collaborators like actors Chloë Sevigny and Jason Schwartzman and designer Alexander Wang. OC’s blog and e-commerce portal created a new sense of brand engagement with behind-the-scenes storytelling as finely curated as its stores (now including Tokyo and Los Angeles locations as well as one in the lobby of Manhattan’s Ace Hotel). Custhe tomers began to follow the brand in a way that anticipated the mentality of social media, creating, as Lim and Leon call it, a “global community.”
Lim and Leon are more than just ambassadors for their brand. They’re culture makers.
It began in Berkeley
“I remember when we first met very vividly,” Lim says a few days following the show. It was 1993. The pair were students at UC Berkeley and both credit the school with forming the philosophy that became the spirit of OC. “My roommate was Humberto’s classmate; she now does all the PR for Balenciaga. She and Humberto were both art majors. One night she brought him over at 10:30 p.m. I was in my pajamas and Humberto invited me out dancing in San Francisco.” Although Lim had early class (she was an economics major), Leon convinced her to go out for a night in SoMa. “That was the beginning of how we interacted. To this day this push and pull persists.”
The pair also met a young global diplomacy/economics major named Patrik Ervell, who later launched an eponymous menswear label, and students Kate and Laura Mulleavy who later founded Rodarte — fellow Berkeley students with the same intellectual-artistic bent.
“We’re Berkeley at heart always,” Leon says. “It was moment in time that really made us.”
“There was just a buzz in the Bay Area at that time.” Lim says.
While the school didn’t offer a conventional design education, Lim says, “I think because we didn’t go to fashion school we all were interested in design via discovery,” which remains a central tenet in the highly cerebral collections Lim and Leon produce for Opening Ceremony and in their roles as creative directors for Parisian fashion house Kenzo.
“We’re Berkeley at heart always. It was the moment in time that really made us.” Humberto Leon, Opening Ceremony creative director
“There were things that interested and fueled us outside of fashion; I think that is what’s been a core strength,” Lim says. “When you live inside (the fashion industry), one can get limited. But that curiosity and the eventual pull toward fashion felt very natural and personal.”
Eventually the pair relocated to New York. In July 2001 they each put up $5,000 of their own money and were ready to sign a lease on a retail space at the edge of SoHo but were thwarted by paperwork delays. Then the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 changed the mood of the city.
“We mulled about whether we should do it for six months,” Lim says, “and then we decided shopping, fashion and creation were not going away. We looked at it as a rebirth. We had nothing to lose.”
Their friend Ervell recalls those first years. “I think there is a kind of breaking down of boundaries of high and low that was really signature to Opening Ceremony in the early days that people emulate now,” he says. “The key secret ingredient is never being pretentious, and when they first started that was a huge breath of fresh air. This was coming off a period where fashion retail took itself very seriously, and Humberto and Carol brought a sense of humor.”
When they started showing at New York Fashion Week in 2013, Lim and Leon turned the shows into fully realized OC experiences.
“I think of the show as creating a memory,” Lim, says. “The seasons can run together and it’s nice to create memories with a longer dialogue.” When followers can immediately view collections via apps, Leon says his and Lim’s approach to fashion week is also about “creating a reason to keep going to shows.”
The falls
When the models performed grand jetés in the September show’s finale, it was finally clear that Lim and Leon had staged the runway falls. “We started by looking at Frank Lloyd Wright,” Leon says of the collection, “then it really became about him and his relationship with his daughter, who was a modern dancer.” OC had teamed up with New York City Ballet choreographer Justin Peck and featured company dancers as models. He says part of the plan was always to “break the idea of the robotic model walk and add some life to it.”
It was just another OC moment: socially provocative cultural references demonstrated with a sense of humor.
After the show, celebrities crowd around Lim and Leon. Kelly Osbourne calls the falls “so f— genius,” and says her favorite thing about fashion is “making things that society deems as ugly and showing people that they can be beautiful. Opening Ceremony is the master of that.”
“For us the attitude is, ‘Let’s always try.’” Lim says. “We’re going to fail sometimes but that’s part of the process.”