Aisles of Style

VITAL STATISTICS:

NAME VERA WANG

CURRENT JOB CHAIRMAN AND CEO, VERA WANG

FIRST JOB YSL BOUTIQUE SALES ASSOCIATE

INSIDE TRACK SPENT 16 YEARS AT VOGUE BEFORE WORKING FOR RALPH LAUREN

CLAIM TO FAME ONCE TRAINED TO BE AN OLYMPIC FIGURE SKATER

Vera Wang has had a storybook career, building a thriving bridal, fashion and housewares empire, but to hear her tell it, she would just as soon have eloped. “I had always wanted to be a designer, and my father said, ‘How do you know you have what it takes to be in fashion?’ And, boy, was I determined. And I showed him. And I’ve lived to regret it,” she says, and then tops the statement off with a gleeful laugh. Wang is kidding, of course. Her sharp, native–New Yorker wit and sarcasm don’t stay hidden under the hem for long. “I say things like this, and people take it and say, ‘Vera hates fashion.’ And I’m trying to be funny, because if you don’t laugh, you’re going to keel over.”

Wang is hyperintelligent, hilariously funny, sensitive—and self-deprecating. Having started out as a fashion editor at Vogue among some pretty big personalities, she has every reason to have adopted some strain of diva behavior. “I am not a diva,” she says. And she’s not. Born to traditional-minded Asian parents and raised with what she jokingly calls “good Midwestern values,” Wang says, she’s “a worker.” Her work ethic—few could argue—has paid off.

What began nearly two decades ago as a tiny shop bearing her name on Madison Avenue has become Vera Wang the corporation. Her name is synonymous with fashionable brides’ and bridesmaids’ dresses. Her evening gowns are red-carpet staples. After an early venture into ready-to-wear proved a critical and commercial disappointment in 2001, she made a risky second dive in with great success—she was named Womenswear Designer of the Year by the CFDA in 2005. She has since launched a younger, secondary line, Lavender, and this fall teams up with Kohl’s to launch a mass-market minicollection, Simply Vera. She has two fragrances and a line of diamonds and sells housewares, linens and china under her moniker. This list goes on and on. “It has been a labor of love,” Wang says of her creations and career, if not always a skip down the aisle.

“A lot of my life has been predicated on not getting what I hoped I would get,” Wang confesses. She spent the first third of her life training to be an Olympic figure skater. Every waking hour was devoted to the sport; she studied classical ballet at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. When she didn’t make the Olympic team, “I had to learn a big life lesson,” she says, “which is that when you are so obsessed by something and you can no longer do it, you dust yourself off and keep going.”

Her next passion was fashion, and it led her from summer jobs at the Yves Saint Laurent boutique in New York City to 16 years as a fashion editor at Vogue, where she did covers and influential shoots with photographers like Richard Avedon and Deborah Turbeville. There too she eyed the top prize. “I don’t think you stay for 16 years and not want the ultimate say,” Wang explains. When she realized she wasn’t going to get it, that she would never be editor in chief, “I had to try to recover,” she says.

She hopped over to Ralph Lauren as design director of women’s accessories. There, “much as I loved sittings,” Wang says, “creating made me feel so good. And it was just genius fun.”

Wang was born creative. “I have always expressed myself, whether athletically or telling tales through fashion shoots,” she says. Along with that nature, she was blessed with nurture. “I had a mother who was superbly chic. She made fashion this adventure for me as a young woman. She viewed fashion not as superficial but as expressive. That’s a big difference,” Wang says. Her father’s attention to design extended all the way to his Hermès eyeglass cases. “I had an immense education from them in everything, not only fashion but in art and painting. They were very sophisticated people, and yet they loved Dunkin’ Donuts too.” The tension of opposites sits easily with Wang. “That’s always been me. That’s how I’ve always dressed. That’s who I am.”

Indeed, sitting in a ninth-floor studio of her New York City atelier, Wang comes across like the overachiever who is also a rebel, the A student who ditches class more than once in a while. She has delicate Asian features but packs a wallop of American wit. Her look is feminine and slight, yet she dresses, she says, “like a boy.” (Today, it’s Yohji Yamamoto black leggings, black T shirt, charcoal ribbed cashmere sweater and a phenomenally oversize jeweled cross.) Partway through college at Sarah Lawrence, she left for Paris, presumably to study, but it was really to hang out with her then boyfriend, an Olympic champion. She waited to get married until she was “39 and 7/8,” she says. “Just under the wire.” It was while scouting for wedding dresses and finding nothing remotely up to snuff that her father said, “‘These are really pretty ugly,'” Wang recalls. “He said, ‘I’ll back you in a business if it’s bridal, but no fashion.'” A few months later, Wang took him up on the offer.

The difference between “bridal fashion” and “fashion fashion” comes up frequently. “I always say we’re not a bridal house. We’re a fashion house that does bridal. There’s a very big difference,” says Wang, who is one of the few American designers to have a full-fledged, European-style atelier, complete with working sample room and U.S.-based factories. If Wang’s version of bridal involved all the thought, handiwork and talent of high fashion, it had none of the spotlight. It was as if Wang were designing on another planet. Her coping mechanism: “I took out my fashion frustration in bridal.” She whipped up couture-worthy collections every season, one time concentrating on bustiers, everything from crumb catchers à la old Dior to Vivienne Westwood–inspired corsetry; the next time exploring every variation of lace. And she created her signature look: elegant, Charles James–style structuring, often adorned with a subtle flourish—a bow made to look like origami or a small cloud of organza.

By the time Wang got behind her collection the second time around, “I had really studied the craft of making clothes,” she says. And while the collection is clearly her crowning achievement, “it’s been a struggle,” she admits. “I don’t want to imply it’s been easy. I’ve thrown everything in my life behind it.” Her opulent, Russian-themed fall collection is inspired by the decadence of the Romanovs. She showed an extremely luxe brocade dress with a Japanese raw twisted-yarn sweater tossed over it and military Cossack boots worn with a beautiful matte-jersey evening dress. “There’s always thought. It’s the padding just here, but no padding there,” she says of a gray taffeta dress that has the boyish slouch of nylon. “I wanted to find clothes again that I would wear and enjoy and don’t already own,” Wang says of her collection line. “I wanted to get my own philosophy across. The way I’ve always dressed.”

The same contradictions that define her personality have defined Wang’s style. “I would wear a Saint Laurent three-quarter-length belted jacket meant to look like a coachman’s jacket in royal blue felt with tight leather pants and flat ballerina slippers.” It’s the mix of high and low that today defines personal style. “Luxe is always more luxe when thrown against something that isn’t. I felt that a good 35 years ago,” Wang says.

Wang’s Lavender line has the structure and attention to detail of the collection line but is a bit younger. It’s “how my daughters dress,” Wang says. They are 13 and 16. Her recently launched Kohl’s line features signature trends of the season: metallic shows up in a gold pseudo-brocade skirt, which she pairs with a crisp white shirt and a heather-gray sweater. A gray jersey dress is one of her favorites, worn with or without a black satiny ruched belt, a very Vera flourish straight out of the bridal line. “These clothes have real detail,” she says. And yet “I don’t want women to be intimidated by fashion. I want them to feel comfortable and enjoy and have fun with it.

“As a woman designer for other women, it’s a very personal, intimate message,” Wang says. “Men bring an abstractness and maybe a freedom, where they’re intuiting what it’s like to be a woman. But women designers, each of us brings our own personal, intimate relationship not only with our bodies but with our minds and with who we develop into as people.” No wonder Wang has come out so well.