"I am still deferential to my parents in a way that my daughters are not to me."
goodg...@yahoo.com
(International Herald Tribune)
Updated: 2006-01-10 09:23
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/07/style/fwang.php?rss
Vera Wang is known for her American bridal empire. But in Shanghai last
weekend she achieved recognition that her parents could never have
imagined when they left their native China for a new life in 1947.
Wang received the China Fashion Award or CFA as International Fashion
Designer of the Year. Born in New York in 1949, she has become the
first designer with Chinese roots to be globally recognized.
Wang, 56, also opened on Sunday a bridal boutique, The Perfect Wedding,
in Shanghai's Pudong Shangri-La hotel. It offers back to her heritage
the stylish, serene, softly colored outfits that have brought a new
sophistication to the white wedding world.
And she is getting to know the ever-changing city, where her father,
the son of the war minister under Chiang Kai-shek, brought her back to
his hometown for the first time two years ago.
"He showed me tradition, the Ming empire, what another China was," she
says. "I saw modern China. I expected bicycles and Mao suits and what I
saw was a pre-Tokyo China with a hunger for Western culture. It is a
wonderfully exciting period. It's so fascinating."
Wang's career has been a chameleon change from a childhood as a
competitive figure skater (who ultimately dressed Nancy Kerrigan at the
1994 Olympics) to her fashion empire of today.
"It has felt like an eternity," says Wang, referring to the long march
that took her from the youngest editor at Vogue magazine, at age 23, to
Ralph Lauren as accessories designer 16 years later and finally to her
destiny: opening a bridal store on Madison Avenue, where she says that
she "paid a terrible price" for being a bridal innovator on the days
when all she sold "was one veil."
Sitting in her trademark black leggings with a white T-shirt, Wang does
not display any of the lush artistry of her clothes. Educated at Sarah
Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she studied art
history, her latest designs - for her fledgling ready-to-wear line -
were inspired by the textiles of Henri Matisse, while the winter show,
with its fur bonnets and trims, was drawn from Flemish painting.
Yet Wang had no formal fashion training to prepare her for creating a
wedding gown with a 16-inch, or 41-centimeter, waist for the marriage
of Posh Spice Victoria Adams to the soccer hero David Beckham; nor for
Jessica Simpson's strapless fairy-tale gown or the grown-up mauve slip
dress that the actress Julianne Moore chose for her wedding day. Nor
did Wang have any design background, although she has created a
successful line of porcelain and crystal for Wedgwood and has just
completed a suite at the Halekulani Hotel in Honolulu, where a
just-married couple can bask in "romantic modernity" for $4,000 a
night.
The reason that Wang turned her back on fashion school in New York was
simple. "My father would not pay for any more education," she said.
"And Vogue is the best training ground any young woman could have."
Wang credits her "chic, creative, cultured" late mother, the daughter
of a feudal warlord, with a passion for Yves Saint Laurent and a
penchant for taking her daughter shopping in Paris, for implanting a
fascination with fashion and style. It was honed by working as a
sittings editor in the era of the photographers Richard Avedon and
Irving Penn.
That eye for style was there in 1998 when Sharon Stone stunned the
Oscars audience by pairing a white cotton man's shirt with a lavender
Vera Wang skirt. As the designer says of her imaginative approach to
evening dressing: "Hollywood has one standard look: a strapless ball
gown."
When Wang decided to leave Ralph Lauren at age 40 to set up as bridal
designer, it coincided with changes in her personal life: her marriage
to Arthur Becker in 1989, and the search for an appropriate wedding
dress. At that time, she was being courted as a designer by Calvin
Klein.
"Calvin thought I was crazy, saying that when the bridal thing doesn't
work, give me a call," Wang says. And Klein was not entirely wrong. The
financial burden of founding a start-up line without deep-pocket
investment, has been no easy ride. As she told the Women's Wear Daily
CEO conference in New York last week: "My career has been every bit as
much about adversity as it has about fashion." She was referring to her
latest move from fashion designer to entrepreneur.
"If you really know the business, you know how much money it really
takes to use special Duchess satin or lace - $40 million a collection,"
says Wang. Her search for perfection even drove her to invest "four
million dollars that I didn't have" in the "Vera Wang on Weddings" book
published by HarperCollins in 2001.
Wang has built her fashion empire in the traditional American way:
through licenses. Although the company does not release sales figures,
Vera Wang Bridal House, creating wedding and evening wear, has been
bolstered by VEW, the licensing division, reportedly turning over
$300,000 annually. That includes a fragrance with Coty; eyewear, furs,
shoes, fine jewelry and table wares. This year a lingerie line and
paper products have been added to the roster.
To the fashion crowd gathered in Shanghai last weekend, the story is
proof that a designer with a Chinese heritage can have global appeal.
Yet Wang is ambivalent about her roots, saying that she learned a
culture and patterns of behavior from her parents that she has not
necessarily passed on to her daughters, now 11 and 14.
"I'm totally Americanized, yet in many ways the feelings I have for
people and the respect I have are inherently Chinese," she says. "I am
still deferential to my parents in a way that my daughters are not to
me."
Wang understands Mandarin and says that her family was "extremely
sophisticated about Asian food and customs." She believes that she
inherited China's "hunger to learn" and "a desire to make more of
yourself."
"America brought me freedom and gave me freedom as a woman," she says.
"In America we think anything is possible. The Chinese feel they have
to work to deserve it. America gives you ease and nonchalance, which is
what I try to do in my clothes.
Wang says that, along with her good friend Anna Sui, she is symbolic
among Chinese people for having made it in America. In Shanghai, she
feels that she has completed a family circle that started before the
People's Revolution and the Communist era.
"This is a very big deal for me emotionally," says Wang. "It really is
my roots."
Ira Humperdink MD
goodg...@yahoo.com wrote:
> Taking China: Vera Wang's long march
> (International Herald Tribune)
> Updated: 2006-01-10 09:23
hey gut -- the article is copyrighted. you should not be posting it on
usenet. it's against us law.
goodg...@yahoo.com
there's no ad revenue?
This is a great article but few people outside of NYC will read New
York magazine (Lai MIng likes Abercrombie and Fitch too :P):
Profile
Vera Wang's Second Honeymoon
Brides love Vera Wang. But does she love them? (Not so much.) What this
former Vogue editor and self-described fashion nun really has a passion
for is clothes. But let her tell you about it.
By Amy Larocca
In the registry department of Bloomingdale's, 400 brides-to-be are
waiting for Vera Wang. They've brought digital cameras and notebooks
for their heroine to sign, like so many crazed teenage girls outside
Justin Timberlake's hotel. They've prepared questions (is it really
necessary to have formal and casual china?), and they've dragged
along their fiancés, who look, for the most part, tremendously bored.
Wang, meanwhile, has arrived, via the giant A-Team-style van she
keeps in a garage beside her Park Avenue apartment. She's in a
Bloomingdale's holding room, holding court.
"Would you like some water, Ms. Wang?" asks one of the many
hovering, black-clad assistants.
"Do you have any vodka?" she answers, glancing toward the
well-organized row of Poland Spring. Her voice is high and sounds
almost deliberately nasal, like a put-on of an old-school garmento.
"I mean, there's got to be some vodka somewhere in this store,
right?" Her publicist looks panicked. "Vodka tonic," Wang
insists, and the assistant is off.
"There are 400 brides, Ms. Wang," another assistant offers.
Wang flaps her hand. "I've totally done more."
What these brides, with their well-thumbed bridal magazines, don't
realize is that Vera Wang is not particularly interested in their
rings, which they'll attempt to show off as they flock around her,
or, really, in the details of their Big Day. Wang-who totally
transformed the bridal market, is a household name, and runs a $300
million business-has her mind on other things.
Four years ago, Wang launched ready-to-wear, and it took. She'd tried
it before, but there was never enough time or money for it.
Ready-to-wear is an expensive proposition, one that requires a
tremendous outlay of cash and often loses money. But this time
everything is different: Wang has licenses. Licenses that last year did
$200 million in retail sales, which means plenty of money for ordering
fabrics and hiring a design staff.
Finally, Wang is consummating a 34-year love affair with clothes. "I
was a total fashion insider who became an outsider when I did
bridal," Wang says. "I've had to crawl out of a hole, and it was
a huge hole. But I've finally done it. I never got to be me. Finally,
I'm making clothes that are about me."
"Not since Donna Karan has there been such an open, clear personality
behind a brand in women's ready-to-wear," says Anna Wintour.
Affirmation has come in several forms: prominent placement on Bergdorf
Goodman's third floor, right near Chloé, Marni, and Balenciaga; and
the CFDA's womenswear designer of the year award last June.
"Vera loves clothes," says Paul Cavaco, the creative director of
Allure who worked with Wang in the Vogue days. "Vera loves clothes
beyond loving clothes; she loves everything that has to do with
clothes. This is not a make-believe love here; it's the real thing.
Anything that has happened to Vera is a fallout of this love. It's
her only agenda. So she is going to present you clothes in an extremely
loving manner: beautiful clothes in the most beautiful way possible."
Vera Wang considers her own style very edgy. She refers regularly to a
pantheon of designers with whom she identifies: Comme des Garçons, Ann
Demeulemeester-designers who work in dark colors with deliberately
offbeat shapes, designers as far from the frothy fantasy of a wedding
day as possible.
In truth, Wang's attitude toward dressing is shared by lots of
fashion editors-one of which she was, at Vogue, for sixteen years.
She wears incredibly expensive clothing (a Prada Astrakhan coat, for
example) in an incredibly offhand way (thrown over leggings and clogs).
She deliberately misaligns the buttons on her fine-gauge cashmere
cardigans and gets a tremendous amount of pleasure from layering,
particularly if a few of the layers are clever finds from the low end
of the market that can be shown off with a mouth-open, wide-eyed
display of disbelief that something so good could actually exist.
"You thought you were meeting a designer," says Vera Wang. She's
barefoot in the full-floor living room of her Park Avenue apartment,
stuffing a Rice Krispies Treat in her mouth. The room is so
ornate-all yellow and gold, with a coordinating Monet on the
wall-that it looks more like a grandly named suite in a very, very
expensive hotel than a home, and Wang, 56 years old but jiggle-free in
a pair of tight black leggings, resembles no one so much as Eloise,
calling out to her housekeeper for her shearling coat. "I'm
actually a little clown," she says, grabbing the leggings in both
hands and yanking them upward. Her daughter has come home, but Wang
doesn't notice. "Are the girls here?" Wang asks her housekeeper.
They are, is the answer. "Okay," Wang says, and she's off.
Wang backstage during Fashion Week at Bryant Park in September.(Photo
credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Wang has always been an Upper East Side girl, the daughter of a wealthy
Chinese businessman. She went to Chapin and then, when her dreams of
becoming an Olympic figure skater didn't work out, to Sarah Lawrence,
where she studied art history (with stints at Columbia and the
Sorbonne). She spent summers working at Yves Saint Laurent on Madison,
where she was already a familiar face from shopping trips with her
mother.
Her fashion madness is legendary. There's a story people tell about
Wang at Vogue: Wang's assistant once rolled a chock-full rack of
current-season fashions into the office of Grace Mirabella, Vogue's
then-editor, for a meeting before a shoot. Wang quickly corrected her:
Those aren't for the shoot-those are my personals.
After college, she wanted to go straight to design school, but her
father wouldn't pay. "He thought the chances of me making it as a
designer were, like, less than zero. He said, 'Listen, I paid for
five years of undergraduate. How about law school or business school?
Go to Yale Law.' I said nope. And then, I think just to make me
really aggravated, he said, 'I'm not paying for anything else.'
"
But Frances Stein, then the fashion director at Vogue, had taken a
liking to Wang at the YSL boutique and suggested she interview at the
magazine. Wang got a job as a sittings assistant to Baron Nicolas de
Gunzburg. "Me," Wang says, rolling her eyes. "Assistant to
someone with a name like that. Can you imagine?" For all of Wang's
money and education, she aggressively identifies herself as not
glamorous: It's like the glamour is a strange appendage to what
she's far more interested in: seams, buttons, and silhouettes.
At Vogue, she was in heaven. "I'd waited there a long time, and I
knew I wasn't getting Anna's job," she says of the moment when
Mirabella was fired. She considers Wintour a close friend-Wintour
once dated Wang's brother.
"There were a bunch of us there, and we were all cruising around our
late thirties and forties, and it was like, we had to get on with it.
So I became European editor and moved to Paris. Right away, I was like,
'Listen, I want to come back.' It was a little grand for me as a
job. I like the gritty parts of fashion, the design, the studio, the
pictures. I'm not really a girl who likes to go out to lunch or
cocktails or store openings. I felt very removed. It wasn't just that
I didn't like having lunch with Gianni Versace, it was just that I
wanted to be a designer still. Very much."
Wang continued to approach her father with ideas: For a while, she
fixated on doing a business consisting entirely of tops. "Ship to
Shore," she called it. "And trust me, it was novel then."
"I was going to be a fashion nun," says Wang. "I mean, that I
should end up in bridal . . . I might as well have been doing scuba
equipment."
Her father was never interested. So she started looking for a job and
got an offer from Geoffrey Beene. "Geoffrey was a real artist, and he
wanted people around who would be fretting over a collar for a long
time. That's what I loved." Wang accepted, but the day before she
was scheduled to start, she got a call from Ralph Lauren. "He offered
me four times what I'd ever had in my life, so I took it. It was very
hard on me because I idolized Geoffrey, and he never spoke to me again.
But I had to have some money. I was 38 years old, and I was still
living off my parents. But he didn't understand."
At Ralph Lauren, Wang got to design: accessories, mostly, but also
lingerie and sportswear. It was an ideal fit. "Vera was the first
woman I knew who exercised," Cavaco says. "It was that moment when
exercising was starting to be something you did in public and
influencing fashion. She was the perfect person for it."
For all her Upper East Side fashion-world credentials, Wang has never
been much of a socialite. Her love has always been her work. Her best
friend is Lisa Jackson, an interior decorator who lives just a few
doors down on Park. They bonded twenty years ago when a mutual friend
had nine wedding showers for herself, and have been inseparable ever
since. "We have literally shopped around the world together,"
Jackson says. There was the time in Paris when they got into such a
frenzy at Lacoste that they stopped bothering with the dressing room.
"That was over T-shirts!" Jackson says. There are also the trips to
the mall in Palm Beach. "We do all of Abercrombie, all of
Bloomingdale's, and we eat Chinese food at the food court," Jackson
says. "And Vera often brings an assistant to carry the bags, because
you just have to buy and you have to buy multiples, and it's always
more than you can carry."
Wang rehearsing models on the runway at Bryant Park.(Photo credit:
Patrick McMullan)
"I do think I know more about clothes than any 500 designers, because
there's nothing like wearing them," Wang says. "You buy them, you
study them, and you start to understand how they're crafted. I was
never a socialite who wore borrowed clothes to parties-I lived them!
When I finally got the chance to design, I was an absolute asshole.
When I saw someone in something I designed, I would literally go crazy
and be jumping around. My poor assistants, who couldn't care less
because they had to, like, vomit out another collection, were like,
'Get over it,' but I was like, 'This is what I was meant to
do.' I was born for this. Pictures are fun and great, but this is
product. I have always loved product. You've got to love product."
When she was just shy of her 40th birthday, she married Arthur Becker,
a computer executive. "I just made it," she says. "I was the girl
who nobody thought would ever get married. I was going to be a fashion
nun the rest of my life. There are generations of them, those fashion
nuns, living, eating, breathing clothes. But Ralph said, 'Get
yourself a husband and a family.' Anna said, 'You have got to get a
family going here. You've been single for three decades now.' So I
married my husband. There are days I'm not happy I did it, but there
are days I'm thrilled-I mean, he has always understood my nature,
which is that it's always about product."
So there was Wang, married and trying to get pregnant. She had stopped,
for the first time in her life, trying to launch a fashion label. And
then her father came around.
"All those years, it was, would you pay for design school? No. Would
you help me do a blouse business? No. Finally, there I was at Ralph, 40
years old and trying to get pregnant, and he said, 'Hey, why don't
you start your own business?' I said, 'What, are you joking? I
don't want to do it.' And he said, 'Now is the right time,
because you don't want to do it. You won't be so emotional.'
Isn't that bizarre? But that's my whole life, right there. And then
he said, 'Bridal.' I said, 'Are you kidding? I don't want to do
bridal. It's a commodity. It's not fashion.'
"I mean, that I should end up in bridal . . . I might as well have
been doing scuba equipment."
There was, however, a great big hole in the bridal business: It was a
brand-name moment, and there was no bridal brand name. "If you're
someone who buys couture, you'll get a Valentino one-off wedding
dress," says Cavaco, "but for the girl who does love fashion and
does spend a lot of money on ready-to-wear, you can't afford that,
but you also didn't want to go to Schmegegies in Brooklyn. That was
the hole Vera filled." She also became the go-to designer for
celebrities: Jessica Simpson, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Lopez, Karenna
Gore, Sharon Stone, Melania Trump.
Bridal is an industry as separate from fashion as possible, considering
both are businesses that traffic in dress. Bridal tends toward hokey:
the stuff of princesses and fantasy. Wang realized that she could make
it far more sophisticated. She partnered with Chet Hazzard, who'd
worked with Anne Klein and others. "Chet always believed in Vera,"
says a friend. "Sometimes even more than Vera believed in Vera."
Hazzard died last year-the same day that Wang was nominated for the
CFDA award.
Wang started out doing retail (her shop now is on Madison Avenue). She
sold wedding dresses by obscure European designers and established a
reputation as tasteful, refined, and elegant. Slowly, she began showing
her own designs as well. "I thought of myself not as a bridal
designer but a fashion designer who happens to do white, ivory, nude.
It's good because it's so off the radar," she says. It was great
training. "There are people out there who can't even cut on the
bias. I do know how to make a dress."
She and Becker started a family, adopting two girls, both Eurasian.
"He did have a say in the whole thing," she says. "I mean, it's
all about me, but he did have a say."
>From bridal, Wang expanded a bit. She'd been a competitive figure
skater, and she began designing costumes for Olympic skaters like Nancy
Kerrigan. (She still designs for Michelle Kwan, a close friend.) And
she began doing eveningwear. Still, all the avant-garde sophistication
she'd picked up in her years at Vogue just sort of languished. "We
were doing ripped seams ten years ago in bridal," Wang says with a
sigh, "but no one got it."
It's very difficult to get Wang to talk about wedding dresses. Ask
her what it's like to deal with a celebrity wedding, and she'll
tell you about putting Charlize Theron in a tangerine-colored,
thirties-style evening gown for the Oscars when she was still feeling
"very Bagger Vance." To Wang, weddings and evening gowns are the
same. "It's costuming," she says. "I'm making sure it looks
good, and my taste is obviously involved, but it's still using
someone else's idea of what they want to look like."
"Anna said, 'You have got to get a family going here. You've been
single for three decades now.' So I married my husband."
In 1999, a Unilever executive named Laura Lee Miller contacted Chet
Hazzard to discuss a Vera Wang fragrance. Two years later, a fragrance,
designed for brides to wear on their wedding day, arrived. "The
olfactory sense is so tied to memory," Miller explains. The
fragrance, therefore, was marketed as yet another piece of the
phantasmagoria of the American wedding. It worked.
In 2004, Miller left Unilever to join Wang's company as the head of
its licensing division. Quickly there were dishes, flatware,
stationery, and, this season, lingerie-there's even a
$5,500-a-night Vera Wang honeymoon suite at an expensive Hawaiian
resort, filled with all these Vera Wang products and, Wang promises the
assembled brides at Bloomingdale's, "a well-stocked bar and lots of
videos about sad single girls that you can watch and laugh at because
now you're married." In the lobby of the hotel is a Vera Wang shop.
"Bridal pays the bills. But mostly, licensing pays the bills," Wang
says. "And that's what makes the ready-to-wear possible. Whatever
losses I incur with this, I cover with fragrance or with china. I've
never had that kind of money before." These days, there are four
apparel divisions at Vera Wang. There's bridal and bridesmaids,
there's a line of dresses at a bridge-level price point (they average
around $550), and then there's the ready-to-wear. "What the
ready-to-wear does is create more visibility for the brand," says
Susan Sokol, the company's president of apparel. "And these are the
opportunities that drive the licensing opportunities. It's a domino
effect-you can't have one without the other."
"I'm so not a dress girl," Wang says on a cold December afternoon
in her design studio. She waves at a board of photos and sketches and
fabric swatches. "These are clothes that I would wear-99 percent of
my energy is going to ready-to-wear." After a slow build over the
past three seasons, Wang has become the talked-about American
ready-to-wear designer. Her spring 2006 collection, which was inspired
by HBO's Deadwood, cinched it. The clothes are incredibly sumptuous
without being fussy. It's sportswear, but it's dressy and
cool-not lady or, as Wang puts it with an elaborate accent on the
second syllable, "madame." It is one of the only American
collections to adopt a spirit that's been exploding European brands
like Lanvin and Rochas for the past several years: it's the idea
that, as the low-end fashion market becomes increasingly well
done-the savvy designs of brands like Abercrombie and Fitch and
American Apparel have all but obliterated the world of the $500
T-shirt- the pressure is on expensive clothes to really feel
expensive, with luscious fabrics and an incredibly sophisticated touch.
A $2,000 cashmere sweater may feel spectacular, but will it look, to
the untrained eye, terribly different from the $200 version from
J.Crew?
Wang understands this. "Look," she says, "I love Michael Kors,
and he is one of my best friends, but I got these adorable Peruvian
pullovers for my daughters at Abercrombie and you just, like, throw
them on for $30. Michael does it on the runway, and yes, his is
cashmere and the fur is lynx and it looks great, but why? That is what
I ask myself always from a design point of view. As a designer, as a
consumer, and as a woman who adores clothes. I try to wear all these
hats at once. Everything has to scream special. If you're selling
product that's expensive, by God it better look it."
So far, the Big Idea for next collection, which will show February 9 in
Bryant Park, is The Talented Mr. Ripley. But this could still change.
Wang is sitting cross-legged on a chair, directing a team that includes
Margo LaFontaine, who sources fabric; Jacques Mugnier, the
pattern-maker and draper; and Luca, a lanky, fit model in a terry robe.
Another designer, Eric Sartori, pops his head in to say he's off to
do a fitting for a celebrity at home. "We're doing house calls for
these people now?" Wang clutches her head between her hands.
"We're kind of moving towards Goya," she says, "because I'm
chairing the Frick ball, and I have to dress all these women, and it
might be nice to make some clothes we could actually use as opposed to
just making a whole collection of dresses for socialites to wear
once." (A few weeks later, the theme will have migrated further.
"Slip dresses," Wang will announce with finality. "Constructed
and deconstructed all at once." And then, naturally, the
all-important suffix: "Because that's how I dress.")
In true fashion-editor form, the biggest compliment Wang can give is
"modern." What's not modern to Vera Wang is anything predictable:
A bias-cut skirt, then, is not modern. Expected color combinations are
not modern-Wang is becoming known for her colors: rich emerald green,
soft mustard yellow, the perfect periwinkle. Today she has fallen hard
for a lavender Brunschwig & Fils taffeta that is $200 a yard and,
truly, far more beautiful than the other taffetas that had previously
seemed perfectly good.
As Jacques cinches the fabric of a silk blouse at Luca's waist, Wang
announces that anything that "goes in and out," anything that's
"va-va-voom," is not modern because "it's not how I dress."
The Wang silhouette is long and lean, with skirts that hit in the
middle of the calf and narrow trousers. There is a great deal of
interest in silhouette-a nod to her bridal training. Wang shows full
taffeta skirts with balloon hems, cocoons the shoulders of a cocktail
dress, and cuts heavy wools close to the body for envelope coats.
Her teenage daughters are her current muses. She loves, she says, to
"put together looks" with them, to teach them the value of a good
Miu Miu duffle coat, but also how to mix it all up. "I love the way
they dress," she says. "So modern."
"I'm very much a feminist," Wang says one day, cruising along in
the backseat of her giant van, discussing her daughters, one of whom
might like to be an actress. "I think that any profession that makes
you feel old by the time you're 21 is very negative. You've got to
start off with something you at least stand half a chance of doing."
Husband though she has, Wang is still a fashion nun. She can't help
herself. But, finally, she's a happy one.
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