We don’t see each other anymore, but for some thirty years she was an incredible champion of my work, always there in the front row, always encouraging and helping me. She was the fashion editor of my life. Also. My friend.
26
One day late in 1989 Nuno Brandolini called to say that Charles Heilbronn wanted to meet me. The name made no impression until Nuno told me Charles was the half brother of Alain Wertheimer, the owner of Chanel. He told me they admired my work very much and were eager to meet and talk about the future of my company. I was incredulous but also anxious, mainly because at that time it was crucial that I figure out long-term financing for my company.
In the early 1980s Alain Wertheimer accomplished the heroic task of taking Chanel, the company for which he staged a bloody fight with his father, and rescuing it from obscurity. He closed all five-and-dime and discount sales of Chanel perfumes and appointed Karl Lagerfeld to revive the fashion brand. This reinvention was the great success story of its time, and it inspired all those comeback brands, like Louis Vuitton, Lanvin, and Balenciaga. I had nothing but admiration for Alain, and I went to the meeting feeling excited.
I met Nuno and Charles for lunch at Bouley, another downtown culinary landmark that had recently opened. Soon after that, a meeting at the Chanel headquarters was scheduled. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. It felt like the handsomest, smartest, richest man in the room was asking me to dance. The office was on a very high floor at 9 West Fifty-seventh Street and had a dazzling view of Central Park. When you walked through those doors you felt like you were floating above the city, and it added to the fairy-tale feeling of the scenario. Sarah and I met Charles, Alain, and someone named Michael Rena, a tall, handsome, middle-aged Englishman who was the managing director of Chanel. There was an intense glamour about that place and those people. It was a connection to Europe, to the old world of real luxury that’s been overdeveloped in recent times. Now there’s a Chanel on every corner of every major city in the world. In those days the brand was still mysterious and alluring. Alain Wertheimer was a small, pale-pink man with wisps of light-brown hair. His presence was strongly felt in the room, but was only heard in the form of monosyllables. “Hmm.” “Oui.” “Non.”
I fell deeper and deeper in love with the idea that I would be the only designer ever to enter into a partnership agreement with the venerable old French house. History in the making. It encompassed everything dear to me—not least a kind of Francophilia that I, like most other young designers my age, harbored. Things were just better in France. There was an unadulterated respect for fashion in Paris. Fantasy and frivolity were encouraged, markdowns were scorned. In those days Chanel never even went on sale. There were rumors, harkening back to my days spent in the Loehmann’s dressing room, that they would burn the clothes that didn’t sell rather than break price. It was the most exclusive brand in fashion, and I hoped that the Wertheimer family, who had built a huge fashion empire with Coco Chanel herself, would help me build mine. Under the original agreement they would fund my company and I would maintain design control of my namesake label, keeping a higher holding to assure the upper hand.
I felt increasingly at home in that heavenly location above Central Park, and the more I went there for meetings the harder I found it to be objective. I wanted the partnership badly, and so did Sarah, who was running out of creative ways to fund the company, which was growing by leaps and bounds. But we weren’t the only ones who wanted the deal. What I didn’t realize was that my credentials were being checked. Alain had close relationships with Anna, Dawn Mello, and a few other editors and store executives who went out of their way to praise me. The day I was to sign the agreement there was some last-minute paperwork, and Michael Rena and I went to a coffee shop to wait. He told me that Alain’s father was originally meant to sign a deal with Halston and never did, and he kicked himself over that for years. Alain saw this deal as a kind of correction of history. As it progressed I fantasized about how beautifully my brand would unfold and skyrocket. Sarah got along famously with these men, and they adored her, though they didn’t realize she had less experience and business acumen than they imagined. Years later when we parted ways, it became clear that they thought that Sarah and I would make it happen, and we thought they would.
There were even rumors that I was being groomed to take over from Karl Lagerfeld when he was finished designing for the Chanel brand. (I might still be waiting all these years later!) The only dissenting voice about our alliance was from Maria Napoli, who warned me against it on two or three separate occasions. For as many times as I’ve had readings, I never understood astrology, only the interpretation, and she kept pointing to two or three bad aspects. Try as I did to convince her it was the right thing, she stood her ground. But even after her warnings I couldn’t bring myself to walk away, so after six agonizing months, a deal was struck. A few weeks after we signed the papers Alain told me the family had named one of their new racehorses after me.
* * *
For the first two or three years of the partnership with Chanel I exhaled, knowing all my bills would be paid and all my collaborators—fabric mills, factories—would stick around to see what might happen. I was able to do my best work, and it seemed like everyone loved it. For the time being I was able to keep my place in the spotlight, give the editors fabulous shows, and give the stores clothes that I thought would sell. The retail auguries were good; I was among the number-one productive brands at Bergdorf Goodman, where I was given a gorgeous stand-alone shop right off the escalator on the third floor, which I earned and maintained just by my sell-throughs. In those days markdown deals were the norm; that’s where designers pay the stores back for the clothes that don’t sell. So were rent agreements, wherein designers pay rent for space in the department stores. My growth at Bergdorf’s wasn’t based on any of those retail conventions. It was a good solid business and what worked at Bergdorf’s eventually was supposed to translate to the bigger retailer picture across the country. The other stores—Neiman’s, Saks, Bloomingdale’s—were biding their time, placing small orders, using my clothes as “window dressing,” which is what insiders call it, and hoping my business would grow just based on the enormous amount of editorial press I was getting. But there was no grand scheme. There was no plan in place to offset the costs of such an expensive business. Somehow the expectation was that eventually I would hit on the magic collection that would generate sales to make my business plan work. While other designer houses relied on markdown money, freestanding retail stores, and advertising to grow their businesses, I was struggling without those tools.
Not to speak of the ill-fated licensing philosophy. For fashion businesses, taking a loss on their couture clothes is a given and licensing is the only means of making any money. That is, the amount of very expensive couture clothing a designer can sell isn’t near enough to cover costs, much less make a profit. Hence the term “loss leader.” This is why most labels license their names for handbags, shoes, perfume—it’s one way to increase revenues to cover the cost of designer collections without a great deal of investment. It’s the only chance anyone has of making any money. I came to understand that the Chanel company had developed all those ancillary businesses—like handbags, shoes, costume jewelry—not as licenses, but from scratch, in-house, almost one hundred years ago, when those sorts of operations were less expensive to build. They owned all the factories. Handbag factories. Shoe factories. Even the factory that made the juice for the fragrance. And it felt as though I was expected to build the same system. Insane as it sounds, we all thought, myself included, I’d follow suit and be the first American designer to use that ground-up tactic as a business model. We were banking on the fact that my company would reinvent the American designer business, and we abandoned any plans for licensing.
So. To review. I had no production facilities, no controlled retail distribution, no advertising, no resources to make markdown deals, and no licensing revenue. High expectati
ons and none of the tools to get the job done. One psychic I consulted said, “They think you’re Jesus Christ.”
* * *
I convinced myself and everyone around me that I needed a bigger, better headquarters. For one thing, we were bursting at the seams. Also it was my thinking that if I weren’t going to advertise, a bigger headquarters would affect editors who came to see me, and editorials would affect business. It was my moment to become larger than life, and I did not shirk that responsibility. I dug my heels into SoHo and the new cultural scene that was developing around me. My partners at Chanel were all for this sort of thing because it cost much less than advertising or a retail program. A glamourous new headquarters made sense to them.
Nina found a building that was for lease, a classic three-story cast iron across the street from where she lived with her husband, Ross Anderson, an architect who I hired to design the building. That building, 104 Wooster Street, came to define me. The way Mariano Fortuny felt about his palazzo or Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. felt about his theatre. People came to see me there. It was more than an atelier, it was a salon. There was one dilapidated freight elevator that opened to the street and had cage doors that were operated for a while by a guy who was also the shipping manager. The second floor was the warehouse and shipping center. The third floor was the design, fabric, and merchandising offices. To look at, it was a mash-up of Japanese paper screen/airplane hangar/plywood. Sound slipping under industrial doors that hung a foot off the floor, and light slipping over walls that stopped three feet shy of the ceiling. It was a design commune where there were no secrets and I was the boss. Highlights from my collection of old hats were displayed on a unit of particle-board shelves that took up an entire wall outside my personal office. The fitting room hosted a crush of supermodels, movie stars, editors, artists, writers, and friends from all fields. Julia Roberts and Rita Wilson. Dan Flavin and his bride-to-be, Tracy Harris. Candice Bergen and Kitty Hawks. Candace Bushnell and Darren Star. Sheila Metzner and Uma Thurman. Manolo Blahnik and André Leon Talley. Lori Simmons and Cindy Sherman. Voguers from the House of Mizrahi and ballet dancers from ABT.
On the top floor, lit up by the skylight, were the showroom and sales offices. Done in industrial aluminum and pale-pink-stained plywood, it had open spaces that felt very luxurious and a poured white-latex floor configured to imply a runway. It’s where I staged many small showings of secondary seasons like summer or spa (a word I used to replace the word “resort,” which I hated so much for its old garmento implications, nothing more than a ploy, another made-up season to get women shopping, and I forbade anyone from using it). There was a wonderful contrast from the decrepit conditions on the street to the fabulous light-filled luxury of my two top floors. The painter Alex Katz came by to see me a few times with his wife, Ada, who was a fan of my clothes. He said his favorite part of my renovation was that I kept the stairwell original and didn’t touch it. He loved the “squalor” and how it set off the beauty and purity of the showroom.
Day-to-day stress notwithstanding, I was happy there. Everyone was. For the ten years we inhabited that place we were the happiest garment-business family in the entire world.
* * *
I convinced my associates at Chanel that it was time for me to develop a small advertising campaign. Not merely to establish my own design point of view, but more to show support for all the magazines and newspapers that had been so supportive of me. I thought of it as a token in the quid-pro-quo that the fashion business is all about. I hoped my tiny placement of ads would justify a little of the huge editorial presence I was given those early years. Also I hoped it would encourage business. While it was clearly not the blockbuster ad campaigns of other brands like Calvin Klein and Donna Karan, and was one page for every hundred pages of Ralph Lauren’s ads, I saw it as an opportunity to make an abbreviated, yet potent, statement of who I was.
Nina had recently become friends with Tibor Kalman, and she arranged for us to meet. Tibor was an iconoclastic thinker, designer, and art director with a company that bore the enigmatic name of M&Co; I think the “M” stood for Maira, his wife, an illustrator and author who worked with Tibor in the design company. His office was a place where nothing bad could happen. It wasn’t postmodern or retro, nor was it cool and hip. It was neutral. The staff dressed in white cotton shirts almost as if it was mandatory, and they sat in rows of desks, set up like a sunny schoolroom, on sturdy, mouse-grey office chairs. The products Tibor designed had already become famous, like the watch with noncorresponding numbers, the paperweight made to look like crumpled paper, and an umbrella lined in blue sky print. It was under his direction that my logo was redesigned to what it still is today, with its customized Bodoni capital M that is such a big part of my identity.
In our first meeting Tibor proposed finding the right photographer to take a “beautiful and chaste” nude of a woman to run as my first ad. But I had other ideas. I wanted Avedon to take a picture of my studio like the one he did of Dior’s in the early 1950s, a kind of ode to dressmaking. But that was not to be. Dick had an exclusive fashion contract with Versace, as I gleaned from Norma Stevens. A few weeks later, at one of our kitchen dinners, as a consolation, Dick brought out a book of a young photographer named Nick Waplington, whom he’d mentored at a master class he taught in London the year before. I loved Nick’s book and brought it to Tibor, who loved it, too.
It was arranged for Nick to follow me around and take pictures of my studio at work. Fittings. Design meetings. The ladies of the workroom. Fashion shows. Nick isn’t a fashion photographer, he’s more a ghost, great at capturing people off their guard. The pictures he made encapsulate the glamour of that time, the frenetic pace, the love that went into those clothes. More than anything, they captured the feeling of happiness in the studio. It was the ease and sense of security that took hold once I knew I had real financial backing. Also I was at the center of an ongoing dialogue among the fashion critics and editors, the likes of which I had not known before, nor since. I’ve done better work, been less stressed, even had bigger media exposure, but never the perfect balance that I had at that time. I wasn’t weighed down by the past, and I wasn’t worried about the future. Those pictures bring that happy, easy time right back. And more than anything, they bring back Tibor.
Tibor had a fleshy face, baby-fine receding brown hair, prominent Alfred E. Neuman-esque ears, and a boyish smile. I had a strong attraction to him, almost physical. He was the perfect man, and most of my thirties were spent woeful that I’d never find anyone like him to love. At the time Tibor wasn’t bound by one job description, he was a great example to me in that way. He wrote things. He designed clocks. He curated museum shows. He edited a magazine. He did it all in an integrated way, yet he rejected the description of Renaissance Man.
I met Maira, Tibor’s wife, when I was seated next to her at a birthday party shortly after I met him, and I loved her instantly in the same way. The work, the person; identities that were impossible to pull apart. There was a familial pull. Maira moved from Israel to New York as a child, and I loved speaking my jokey broken Hebrew to her, a vestige of my checkered yeshiva past. In a trice I was invited to dinner with the family at their apartment. I walked into the lobby of that gracious building in Greenwich Village and felt a kind of prophetic peace. Like something great was happening. Nina was at that dinner, and we all laughed at the same jokes, which ran the gamut from well-wrought one-liners to Tibor balancing a bowl of spaghetti on his head. Also the Kalman children were there; Lulu, who was about four and Alexander, who was just a toddler. I loved them on first meeting, the way one is meant to love a niece and nephew.
One day in the spring of 1991 Maira told me about an apartment right upstairs that was for sale. The door was open so we snuck in and toured it. I still have a picture of seven-year-old Lulu from that day, sitting on the mantel in the sunny shambles of a living room. After a lengthy renovation (which was also designed by Ross Anderson) I moved in and was made to feel even m
ore like an uncle, a brother, a relative. The Kalmans were the center of my life. Countless last-minute dinners. Holidays. Openings. A book party Tibor held at the A&P in Chelsea is as memorable to me as any of my own fashion shows. If My Man Godfrey or The Navigator or Jules et Jim was playing at the Film Forum, we’d go together. And when Tibor and Maira outlawed TV in their place, Lulu and Alex would sneak upstairs to watch with me. We lived in a smart, cozy world, of which our building was the center. Work collaborations seemed to enrich the bonds in the way religion corroded them with my blood relations. I couldn’t help comparing this new closeness with the increasing distance I felt from my relatives. I had to disguise parts of my life to be around my sisters and their children; I didn’t hide anything around the Kalmans.
I got to know Maira’s mother, Sara Berman; a sort of Israeli Gracie Allen. A beautiful woman in white. White hair, white clothes, any room she walked into was blown out with white light. She and I sat next to each other at the edges of overcrowded Seder tables year after year talking about art, her grandchildren, and Jeopardy!, which she loved as much as I did. She’d slyly weigh in about the occasional date I brought to dinner. On one of the last of Sara’s numerous yearly trips to Israel she asked me if I wanted her to put a note for me in the Wailing Wall. After a long think I decided it couldn’t hurt, so I gave her a slip of paper asking the fates to send me a husband. I attributed my meeting Arnold to her and that note.
More than anything, there were jokes and laughter. It was an upstairs-downstairs support system. Like Mapp and Lucia carrying baskets to the high street for gossip, there were strolls to Balducci’s or Jefferson Market together; impromptu meetings in our respective kitchens; lunches at Japonica; dinners at Bar Pitti; and many meals at Florent, a restaurant that Tibor had a dominant hand in creating. Florent Morellet opened the place on Gansevoort Street in the burned-out Meatpacking District way before it became the gentrified shopping mecca it is now. It’s hard to think of that spot without Florent there, even these many years since its closing. We were always there. It was the better part of an outing to the theatre; a center to meet for late-night recaps; a destination for long breakfasts the morning after; and the location for all kinds of birthdays and extended-family gatherings.
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