Look like a lady who lunches: Make your way to CH Carolina Herrera

LADIES, clutch your collective pearls in unison. The queen of polite but striking fashion, CH Carolina Herrera, just opened its doors last week in Greenbelt 5.

Just for a bit of fashion history: Carolina Herrera, a Venezuelan socialite, partied across continents thanks to a packed social calendar throughout the 1960s. Her flamboyant style toned down by classic tenets of dressing handed down through generations of good breeding was noticed in the International Best Dressed List of ’72. In 1981, eminent fashion editor Diana Vreeland pointed out to Mrs. Herrera that she could make a killing selling clothes based on her own style, and since then has remained in the fashion industry. Through Mrs. Herrera’s talent and notable social contacts, fashion icons have been frequent clients of hers, including former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was then tapped to design her daughter Caroline Kennedy’s freshly feminine wedding dress when she married Edwin Schlossberg in 1986.

Mrs. Herrera’s fashion empire then extended to perfumery, when she lent her name to Spanish fragrance company Puig, which has since released a series of highly-recognizable perfumes. In the ’90s, the company acquired most of the Carolina Herrera empire and kept the woman herself as Creative Director. In the 2000s, the company launched a ready-to-wear line, CH Carolina Herrera, which arrives in the Philippines via the Trimark group, which also brought brands Vera Wang and Rosa Clara to the country.

The CH Carolina Herrera store, located in Greenbelt 5, carries the brand’s full line of accessories and apparel. “You can also see that there’s a gap in the market for products like these,” said Obee Ham, Trimark’s Head of Business Development. “Most of the luxury brands [ here] don’t offer apparel,” she noted. And this is true: several of the stores in the posh shopping center might have bags, shoes, and scarves, or whatnot, but one has to travel to Hong Kong for an afternoon to get ahold of, say, a fur-trimmed skirt from Louis Vuitton.

The shop is decorated like a plush home, with cozy furniture and gilding, and as a personal touch, photographs of Mrs. Herrera in various stages of her life. Most of the designs, apparently, are based on what Mrs. Herrera herself would wear, such as her ubiquitous crisp white shirts, making appearances from her afternoon promenades to her riding camels in the desert. “Just like how she is, when you see her at Fashion Week and all that,” said Ms. Ham. She added that the company has long since wanted to build in the Philippines but couldn’t find the right partner and the right location, until now. “It was perfect timing.”

While one may wonder what the brand would do in here, placing its whole ready-towear line in a developing country — its prices are definitely top-drawer: one of its folding fans costs P5,000, and a tiny bag scarf costs up to P7,400 — one has to remember that the small market it would cater to ( polite upper-class women) can be quite voracious. “Yesterday, when they saw the sales, they were very surprised,” said Ms. Ham. “You’ve sold all the categories.” —