Las Mujeres - Herrera, Carolina
Carolina Herrera - Biography
Profile of a fashion designer
When Carolina Herrera turned 40, she decided to do something new.
What could be novel for an aristocratic woman who had been everywhere
and met everyone? Well, work. For although she had run houses and was
raising four daughters and managing a marriage -- activities that,
taken together, were the equivalent of presiding over a small company
-- Herrera had never set foot in an office or cashed a paycheck
except during a brief stint doing p.r. for Pucci. At times, however,
she had collaborated on her wardrobe with couturiers in her native
Caracas; she knew her sense of color and texture was first-rate. The
best career choice, she decided: fabric designer. But Count Rudi
Crespi, the famed fashion publicist who had introduced such Italian
designers as Valentino and Fendi to America, thought she could do
more. "He saw some clothes Carolina had made," recalls his widow,
Consuelo Crespi. "He told her, 'You must be a fashion designer."'
Carolina's mother was no longer alive, but her father weighed in with
a less-than enthusiastic opinion. Her mother-in-law, the formidable
and ultrafashionable Mimi Herrera, also dismissed the whole idea as a
"whim." Even her husband Reinaldo -- her greatest champion and
constant cheer-leader -- didn't fully understand the implications. "I
was supportive because I thought this would last fifteen minutes," he
explains. "If she had said it would be fifteen years, I would have
asked her, `Are you out of your mind?"'
But of the so-called "society" designers who emerged in the 1980s, a
group that included Carolyne Roehm, Jacqueline de Ribes and
Christophe de Menil, only Herrera has survived. Indeed, her business
and her reputation have grown so steadily that critics no longer
dismiss her as the woman who designs only for her friends (including
the late Jacqueline Onassis, whom Herrera dressed exclusively for the
last twelve years of her life) and for the ladies who lunch. With her
perfume and accessories companies expanding along with her fashion
business, she is in a league with Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass --
designers who have been at it for more than three decades. As a
woman, Herrera has an advantage that de la Renta and Blass don't
enjoy. She can, for example, walk up to her clients and say with
sisterly appreciation, "I love the way you're wearing that." And
she
can share with them her beauty and style secrets, happily revealing,
if asked, her exercise regimen (walking) and skin-care strategy
(Janet Sartin products, since forever).
Apart from her understanding of what women want to know and to look
like, and the attractiveness, exquisite tailoring and quality of her
clothes, Herrera has another great asset: her own image. Her manners
are flawless. She speaks English with an irresistible Latin clip and
accent, in a voice that is soft and lilting. But most of all, there
is her beauty, a noble kind that evokes the Renaissance paintings of
the Spanish infantas -- smooth, creamy skin, high cheekbones, and an
oval-shaped face offset by haunting chocolate-brown eyes and a full,
expressive mouth. In a time when true elegance good manners and
intrinsic femininity are hard to come by, Herrera is an inspirational
figure. "Carolina is the epitome of class:" observes Rose Marie
Bravo, president of Saks Fifth Avenue. "She has evolved into a key
designer for the elegant, well-traveled, worldly client who requires
a certain sophistication and subtlety and who is not subject to the
whims of fashion trends. We all want to look like her and dress like
her."
But although Herrera may look like a duchess, she's not at all grand.
In fact, she can be extremely funny -- she loves to puncture
pretension, and not just in others. A few years ago, she was seated
in a friend's box at the Metropolitan Opera on opening night. During
the performance, a woman in the next box leaned over and whispered,
"Do you have a nail file?" Herrera could have raised an eyebrow at
this breach of cultural etiquette. Instead, she replied, in a
perfectly deadpan manner,"I am a seamstress -- not a manicurist."
Carolina Herrera is one of those enviable women who can travel for
hours and arrive looking as unwilted as when she left her Upper East
Side town house. It's almost eerie; her clothes never rumple, her
makeup never fades. And her good mood is as constant as her good
grooming. Here we are, for example, at die airport in New York, with
both the temperature and the humidity hovering around 90. We're on
our way to Greensboro, North Carolina, where she is to present a
fashion show of resort clothes at Coplan's, a local store, for the
benefit of Cancer Care. I am already wilted; my hair is flying in
directions heretofore unknown. But Herrera is crispness incarnate in
a white man-tailored shirt, khaki-colored straight-legged trousers
that hit perfectly at the ankle, and a collarless blue cotton blazer
Her shoes are red alligator-skin Belgian Loafers. Her crimson handbag
bears her own label. Her earrings are the simplest possible pearls.
This is her version of casual wear; anyone else would call her look
smart, chic, glamorous. And anyone else would be drenched.
In public, Herrera is reserved, even shy. Watching her as the center
of attention at the Coplan's event, it's easy to see the reason for
this reserve. After the show, she is besieged by devoted customers.
"You are as beautiful as your clothes," one woman gushes. Another
describes all the Herrera pieces she's bought over the last ten years. Herrera
is obviously pleased -- and also a bit at sea; she gives each woman a warm
response, but her upbringing taught her to present herself with great style
without calling attention to herself. Praise has the paradoxical effect of
pushing her back into herself, instead of bringing her out. And that only fascinates
people
more.
After the show, as we drift into the mall's cafeteria for lunch, all
that changes. She's still attired in the outfit she wore to the event
-- a beige-and-white checked dress of her own design with a matching
short jacket and Chanel sling-back heels. But although she looks as
if she has dropped in from another planet, one where the natives have
a completely different sense of fashion, Herrera seems at home,
totally down-to-earth. She orders a turkey sandwich and carries her
tray past diners in jogging suits to an empty table across a sea of
Astroturf -- just another woman at the mall. This great personal ease
obscures die fact that, even on Seventh Avenue, Carolina Herrera is
very much an alien. For the wonder of Herrera is not that she is such
a successful designer, but that she is a designer at all. Maria
Carolina Josefina Pacanins y Nino was raised for a privileged,
private life, much like an upper-crust character in a novel by her
friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But this life wasn't frivolous. "My
mother believed you had to be cultivated," Herrera recalls. "Having
an inner life was very important to her. She told her four daughters,
`Beauty is the first thing to go. If you don't have anything inside
you, you are going to be so lonely.' So she pushed music and books on
us. She encouraged us to be interested in everything. One reason I'm
never bored is that we were never allowed to say that when we were
children. My mother insisted, `There is no such word as boredom."' In
this household, culture included fashion. "I grew up looking at my
mother and grandmother's beautiful French couture clothes," she says.
"And they told us, over and over again,' It has to look beautiful not
only outside but inside too. `That was the start of my mania for well-
finished clothes" -- and for the slight distinction between fashion
and style. Bella Behrens Dalla Costa, a friend from Venezuela who has
known Herrera since she was 14, remembers her as "always different
from the other girls. If she wore a scarf, it always had a different
touch." She had a brief rebellion -- "When I was 16, 1 yearned to
be
a vamp and wanted to wear lots of makeup and black" -- but at 18, she
bowed to convention and made a socially correct marriage. Work was
forbidden. Culture was not, so in addition to such expected
activities as riding, tennis and golf, she took courses in literature
and often spent her evenings at lectures and concerts. Eight years
and two daughters later, she was the first person in her family to
get divorced. "I agonized over the decision," she recalls. "I
didn't
know how to tell my mother. When I finally did, she replied, `I've
been expecting this.'"
Three years later, in 1968, she married her first love, Reinaldo
Herrera, the scion of one of Venezuela's most prominent families.
They produced two daughters, lived at La Vega, his family's 16th-
century, sixty-five-room hacienda, and enjoyed a glamorous
international life that featured close friendships with the A-lists
of three continents. During the Seventies, Rienaldo, a brilliant
raconteur, had a talk show called "Buenos Dias" on Venezuelan
television (he is now special-projects editor at Vanity Fair), and
Carolina's distinctive style earned her a place in that temple of
high chic, the International Best-Dressed List, where she remained
from 1971 to 1980 before soaring to Hall of Fame status. In those
years she wore Saint Laurent and then became a champion of some the
most influential emerging Italian designers -- Walter Albini, Mila
Schoen, Pino Lancetti, Giorgio Armani and Tan Guidicelli. She blended
their supremely classic style with her own Latin flair for the dramatic.
It was a look that the late Diana Vreeland -- one of her mentors --
called "la bombe." That Herrera style is best clarified in Vreeland's
own words in a 1981 interview: "She came to dinner dressed right out
of a Goya painting. She had a dress that was ten to twelve inches
from die floor white stockings and black silk pumps. Her hair was
encased in a snood. She's got this superb line, this incredible brow
line. She has a very strong, noble forehead. She's really a blonde
bombshell." And then Herrera entered the fashion business, and
everything changed. "In 1980, Carolina told me she had designed a
collection of clothes and wanted me to critique it," recalls Lynn
Manulis, who is now proprietor of Martha in Palm Beach but was then
overseeing her mother's legendary Park Avenue shop of the same name.
"I went to her apartment. There were three racks of clothes -- but I
only needed to look at the first to see that the quality, styling and
color were exquisite. I told her so. `But are they commercial
enough?' she asked. I said I was sure she would be an overwhelming
success." For all her astuteness in consulting Manulis and Vincent
Knoll at Saks Fifth Avenue, Herrera was remarkably naive about the
less exalted aspects of fashion. "When I started, I didn't make the
connection between the designing and the business," she says. "I
had
a fantasy vision of this career. It was, `Oh, a designer! How
glamorous! This is divine!' I had no idea I would be at the office
the whole day. I thought I would design a collection and then go home."
A year later she made her design debut -- at New York's Metropolitan
Club -- and then flew to Dallas for her first trunk show. "I couldn't
believe it," she says. "People were waiting in line. They bought
everything; they even wanted the jewelry I was wearing." It took the
critics to bring her back to reality. "I had bad reviews at the
beginning," she says, with a shudder. "And when you haven't been
involved in this world, they really affect you. But that was good --
you read the reviews and see what they found wrong and you think,
`They were right.'" What saved her was a quality rarely seen in
naifs: an absolute confidence in her talent. "I knew that if I made
clothes that were real, clothes that women could wear, clothes that
fit, my business would work," she says. "We've all seen designers
who
make beautiful clothes that don't fit. They sell one collection, but
not the next."
If you listen carefully, you can detect a gentle disdain for the hype
that fashion has generated in recent years. "When I was growing up,
`fashion' and `style' were not discussed," she admits. "They were
just there. The most anyone would say about a woman was, `She's so
elegant' Now people talk about these things all the time --
everything's `chic' or `stylish.' But fashion is like everything else
in life. You need a frame of reference. Fashion is a repetition of
ideas. It's the way you put it together that makes it different."
Fortunately for Herrera, she has no shortage of ideas. From the
beginning, the refinement and detail of her clothes have generally
been grounded in her past. One of her most vivid memories is of the
time her grandmother took her to see the couture collection of
Cristobal Balenciaga, whose construction and simplicity of line are
still great inspirations. References also come from a more distant
past: the blues in the paintings of Goya or the intricate embroidery
of an 18th-century fabric.
In recent years, she's also been influenced by her daughters. "I hate
retro looks!" Herrera exclaims. "I visualize my daughters and their
friends. I love the way young people put things together." Whatever
the inspiration, Herrera's clothes have consistently had one thing in
common -- a purity that those who use the fashion-speak she loathes
would call "classic" and "glamorous." Even at the height
of the '80s,
when designers turned fashion into a hymn to opulence, Herrera held
her ground. She moved on from big-shouldered dresses to simple sheer
wool-crepe dresses with vividly colored silk inserts at the shoulder
and waistline. Herrera loves the exotic and the glamorous -- "I
believe it's better to be overdressed than underdressed!" -- and she
does translate her take on glamour for her clients. But that doesn't
mean she sees them as society women whose calendars are nothing more
than an endless series of lunches and dinners. Instead, she sees them
as women who have careers, who travel, who have a social life -- who,
in short, lead busy lives. And so the only criticism from die 1980s
that brothers her is the charge that she made her name by dressing
her friends.
"My clothes are for many women," she says. "Jackie Onassis was
fantastic for me -- she had a wonderful way of wearing clothes. She
was a great inspiration, but there are other women around, too. If I
only dressed my friends, my company would have folded years ago. It's
ridiculous when you think about it. How on earth could they think
this?" In Herrera's view, the "clothes had to stand on their own."
She made that point by refusing to capitalize on the Onassis
connection or name other famous clients. "What you have to do to
promote yourself in New York is everything Carolina is not," says her
dear friend Alexandra Theodoracropulos. "Her education taught her
that you don't talk about yourself, and you don't discuss your
achievements. Even though she had that barrier, she has -- in her own
quiet, subdued way -- still managed to be successful and achieve what
everyone else achieves by tooting his own horn." That she has moved
beyond the "society designer" label and has survived in the impolite
world of Seventh Avenue is partly due to a young, devoted team that includes
Bill Hamilton, her assistant designer of thirteen years; Deborah Hughes, her
public-relations director and organizer of her fashion shows for sixteen years;
and others who have been with her nearly as long.
Bernadine Morris, the freelance writer and former fashion editor for
The New York Times, offers another insight: "Besides her
understanding of how women want to look, Carolina has a very clear,
clean, analytical mind that does not go with fashion. If you see her
collection in advance, it's done. You would associate that trait with
a lawyer It's a different attitude not enough imitated or commended
in the fashion industry." Just as her clothes show a keen sense of
proportion, so does her life. "She divides her time into the
compartments she considers important at any given time: designer,
wife, mother or friend," says her husband. "But in terms of priority,
she's a mother first, and then everything else." I saw this side of
Herrera at a cocktail party she hosted in her design studio to launch
her new line of accessories. At the height of this event, she spotted
me in the crowd and hurried over. She led me to her office, which
looks more like the study of a private home. On her desk was the
reason she had brought me here: a magazine opened to a gorgeous
photograph of her youngest daughter Patricia, who works as an
assistant to the editor of Vanity Fair. "This just came today," she
says. "Doesn't Patricia look beautiful?" This commitment to family
helps enormously in the design studio, in the executive office, and
in her dealings with stores and editors. "My mother has never been a
businesswoman who think like a business-woman" says her second-eldest
daughter Ana Luisa Calicchio, a former Mademoiselle editor who has
just had her first child. "She's very maternal with everyone. That's
what never comes out about her: how hard she works to achieve
harmony." If no one sees the effort involved, it's because Herrera
makes the transitions quickly, decisively -- and privately. "You
always think she has time to be with friends," Lynn Wyatt notes. "You
never think, `Oh, she's running a big organization. `You don't see
that quality very often, particularly in women." Her overriding
aesthetic, it would seem, is to make each moment as beautiful and
pleasing as possible. And not just for herself. Years ago, she began
to have fitting dresses made in every size, so that when her
customers around the country go to local trunk shows, they're not
confronted with "sample" sizes. These fitting dresses are cut to
the
same measurements as the clothes she'll make -- a common-sense
approach that, to my knowledge, is not followed by any other designer.
Sixteen years after she started her fashion business, Carolina
Herrera's children are grown and on their own. Her name is
established. She's in her mid-50s -- no one would blame her if she
decided to extend her empire through judicious licensing. But that is
not Herrera's way. Although she insists that her workdays -- and
those of her colleagues -- begin at nine and end at five, she seems
to be working even harder now than when she started. In recent years,
she has introduced a line of bridal dresses, three perfumes and a
men's cologne, an accessories business (ladies' and men's leather
goods, scarfs and neckties) and a knitwear collection. And, unlike
most other designers, she designs everything herself. These
businesses are not licenses -- she owns them with her partner,
Compar, which is the distribution arm of Puig, a well-established
Spanish perfume company.
In the last year alone she has introduced, in addition to her
accessories business, a line of Carolina Herrera cosmetics to be sold
in Spain, the United Kingdom, the Middle East and South America. And
this month she introduces her fifth fragrance -- called "212" --
in
the US. Named for the Manhattan area code, the fragrance, she says,
is "based on something very real. I was inspired by my daughters, and
the way they live. For me they symbolize New York. Their social life
is an eclectic mixture of people and places all over the city. I
wanted to express that in a scent that is modern, fresh and light."
Her daughter Carolina Jr., who works for a Manhattan-based film-
production company, has been active in the launch of "212." She has
worked with the creative team on the design and advertising of the
fragrance and will make personal appearances with her mother to
promote it. The launch of "212" symbolizes a new professional
direction for Carolina Herrera: to target a younger customer and
expand her clientele. "Everyone in the business world is young. So
why not learn?" she says.
And it is learning and change that motivate Herrera today. "The
business has evolved so much. So many different collections. I feel
like I've been doing this my whole life. I've done a lot, and I'm
happy with what I've done -- but I still have a lot to do. I mean, a
lot" It's this sense of ongoing purpose that reminds C.Z. Guest of
some long-departed friends. "Carolina is like one of the great,
legendary women of style reincarnated," she says. "It's not
surprising that she became a designer; it's not who you are, it's
what you make of yourself. And she's just gotten better, like a good
horse. The more successful you are, the more radiant you become --
that's your reward." Herrera would say that the reward is
secondary.For her, it's the process that matters.
"I love what I'm doing," she told me, at the end of a day that she
could easily have called exhausting. "If I had to stop, I would be
very upset. The more I do it, the more I love it. Even with all the
complications. Even with all the problems. Those don't matter. If I
had to do it again, I would do it from the beginning in the very same
way."
Town & Country Monthly, Sep 1997
By Annette Tapert.
