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Taking China: Vera Wang's long march
(iht.com)
Updated: 2005-11-08 13:36
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.
Vera Wang
[cri] | 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."
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