Cover up, designer pleads
Famed designer decries ‘almost naked’ trend
NEW YORK —DesignerCarolina Herrera, wearing a welltailored, 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-fromthe-salon hair that belies the day’s spitting rain. She wears a discreet hint of lipstick. She looks pristine, unhurried and genteel.
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-towear 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.
Jaws need not drop for Herrera to declare a collection a success. In fact, she is disappointed — troubled, baffled — 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,” Herrera says in a tone that is both exasperated and dismayed. “It’s an obsession now.”
Herrera is not a prude. She is more than willing to give her customers a plunging neckline, but doing so requires care and a precise placement of the breasts underneath the fabric. “If it’s open so much, they look like fried eggs,” Herrera says. “Fashion is about proportion.”