Vera Wang’s Second Honeymoon

Vera Wang’s Second Honeymoon By Amy Larocca, an award-winning journalist.   She spent 20 years working at New York magazine as both Fashion Director and Editor at Large. Jan. 12, 2006 saved

Save this article to read it later.

Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section.

Comment Wang backstage during Fashion Week at Bryant Park in September.Photo: 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: 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.

Show Leave a Comment Vera Wang’s Second Honeymoon