Carolyne Roehm's Constant Thread

With Carolyne Roehm at her book party in Susan Gutfreund's Fifth Avenue home, and the cover of her gorgeous new book.
     Carolyne Roehm, a longtime friend of this blog, has a new book out called Design & Style: A Constant Thread. Besides being impressively large and heavy (you could do bicep curls with this thing), it's unusual for Carolyne, who has produced twelve books, because this one is largely autobiographical.
     We caught up with Carolyne a few years back at home and did two video interviews on the blog when she published her book A Passion for Interiors. Her living room, with its double height ceilings and brown velvet walls, is I think the most beautiful I've been in. Two years later we did a video with Carolyne in the New York City flower district for her book Flowers.
     Throwback to a book party past –

   For this book, Carolyne's friend Susan Gutfreund hosted a party in her renowned apartment on Fifth Avenue, and that was a real treat. The Fifth Avenue building was designed by architect Rosario Candela, who I recently wrote about for Architectural Digest. The stunning apartment was decorated by Henri Samuel, who was the subject of a book by Emily Eerdmans Evans, which I wrote about here on the blog. Candles flickered in the long salon facing Fifth Avenue where the party was held, and we had the chance to duck into the celebrated Winter Garden room, which is decorated in tones of yellow and green and pink.

    Carolyne is dedicated to beauty and her books have been about her expertise and passions in decorating, gardening, fashion and entertaining. With this book she combines them all and explores how everything she does, from her fashion designs to setting a table to arranging flowers, is inspired by her consistent taste and style - her constant thread. This book is unique too because she writes about her personal life experience. 
Carolyne at home in the 80s and her gorgeous peonies –

Joyful tulips inspired this Roehm design –

     Carolyne Jane Smith grew up in a Missouri farm town and was called Janie Smith until she decided to go by her first name and married Axel Roehm. She later married Henry Kravis, the Wall Street financier, who invested in her designer fashion collection. For ten years at the height of the rollicking 80s the couple were the toast of the town. But in the early 90s came divorce, her decision to close her fashion company and an unsuccessful attempt to start a catalogue business. Carolyne writes that, "there were moments in which I genuinely believed I wouldn't find the strength or the will to continue."
      As an escape, she decided to go to a college in England to study Shakespeare's tragedies, thinking that "the Bard might help me understand what the hell had gone wrong with my life." She tells a funny story about being locked out of the college dorm while taking a shower and hanging naked by her fingertips off a windowsill three stories above ground. There were regrets about her decision to close her fashion business and walk away from her catalogue venture. In Paris she had an unpaid internship at the legendary flower shop Moulié Fleurs and had the idea to create an everyday, how-to-book about flowers.
     In one of her designs –

Carolyne in Chanel and one of her creative gift wrappings –

    Carolyne returned and writes, "...now three years after I'd slunk out of New York, feeling in every meaningful way a failure to myself, I was back. At my lowest moment, I had gotten off the floor and taken a baby step, one that liberated me to move on to a new, and very rewarding enterprise. Once that happens, you never lose the faith that no matter how difficult life becomes, if you just take that step, things will get better. That was the great lesson of my wilderness years."
     Hers is a wonderful story of resilience and strength, and how creativity, beauty and art can rescue a person. A Passion for Flowers was the first of a dozen books. Carolyne is also an accomplished watercolor painter and she announced on Instagram (@carolyneroehm) that she has just launched a collection of Chinoiserie jewelry on her website. She designs and creates boundlessly without fear or limitation. I think these traits are in fact her constant thread. Cheers to Carolyne Roehm, a great inspiration.

A Breakfast Talk On the Changing Fashion Industry

The discussion at Skylark with, from left to right, Ariel Foxman, Ron Frasch and Gary Wassner.
Instagram influencers, e-commerce, see-now, buy-now collections – the world of fashion, like the world of media, is going through seismic changes, and these disruptions and more were discussed over breakfast recently at the swanky Skylark lounge located 30 floors over Manhattan in the center of the Garment District. The marketing communications agency LaForce organizes Tuesdays at The Skylark, a program series where leaders in fashion, technology and business network and connect, and discuss trends, topics and insights, so I found myself recently perched there enjoying breakfast and coffee and listening to an interesting discussion about fashion in flux.

The breakfast was moderated by Ariel Foxman, the former editor-in-chief of InStyle magazine, who asked smart questions of Ron Frasch, formerly the president of Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman and now a partner at the private equity firm Castanea, and Gary Wassner, president of Hildun which finances young designers and has worked with Marc Jacobs, Tommy Hilfiger and Alexander Wang. At the retail level, the panel noted that while shopping online is convenient, e-commerce has a high rate of returned merchandise. In stores, personal service is very important, and both Frasch and Wassner observed that the new Saks Fifth Avenue at Brookfield Place in lower Manhattan has successfully created a compellingly curated merchandise presentation rather than a traditional department store scheme. Fast fashion, offered by the likes of H & M and Zara, has opened up new trends to more people, and made men and women more sensitive to what they wear at a younger age.

Criticism fell on the fashion delivery calendar, which illogically dictates that heavy fall clothes are delivered into stores in August at the height of summer heat. Some August deliveries are now beginning to move to the more appropriate month of September. The panel also had doubts about brands that don't clearly define themselves. Said Gary Wassner, "If you launch a brand, you have to think who are you? What do you represent? What is your story? Most brands don't think about that."

Rosemary Feitelberg from Women's Wear Daily, who reviewed my book How I Look, asked the panel what they were most encouraged about for the future of fashion. "That we are talking about this," replied Ron Frasch. "Appropriate delivery at the appropriate time is very exciting. Now we are listening to the consumer." Gary Wassner was optimistic about "the abundance of talent we have in New York City. It's now possible for young brands to emerge sooner via social media."

Video Tour: Charles James at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

It's time for a trip to the Charles James exhibit currently up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 10th. Charles James was the great American couturier who famously draped and shaped some of the most beautiful dresses created in the American haute couture. James, who was self-taught, designed in his native London before arriving in New York City in 1940. The designer was an artist whose medium was fabric and whose dresses were masterpieces. He was renowned for his striking color combinations, and his cut and construction, always refining and perfecting his living sculptures. But he was also eccentric and had a hard time running a business. The designer lived and worked in one room in the Chelsea Hotel on West  23rd Street. When he passed away there in 1978 at the age of 73 of pneumonia, he was largely unrecognized and unappreciated. However, his structured dresses with narrow waists and flaring skirts influenced Christian Dior when Dior created the New Look in the late 40's, and so though he is not a well-known household name, Charles James shaped the direction of fashion. 

Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, photograph by Cecil Beaton. 
The exhibition was curated by Harold Koda and Jan Glier Reeder, and is located in two areas at the museum – in the new Anna Wintour Costume Center on the lower level as well as an exhibition gallery on the first floor. The show was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York architects we met at a book party at Ann Ziff's fine jewelry store.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro lit the clothes dramatically to highlight their shape. Charles James loved to combine different fabrics like deep, dark velvet and glossy, lustrous satin –

which is here worn by the great Babe Paley herself.

Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
Besides the clothes, there are on display accessories, drawings, videos, and some pithy quotes from Mr. James.

During the press preview for the exhibition, workers were preparing for the big Met Ball which was being held that very night. Here in the Great Hall, a kind of giant deconstructed Charles James ballgown made out of orange roses loomed over the entrance.

I had the pleaure of talking with the brilliant curator Harold Koda at the press preview, and my friend Scott Brasher made a video of the visit. Enjoy this nice long talk with Harold, and learn more about the great American fashion designer Charles James. 

A Visit to the Carr Collection

Zack Carr and George Carr in Istanbul in 1995 (click on photos to enlarge)
One of my favorite big, over-sized books sitting on my book shelf is called Zack Carr. 

It is a tribute to the American fashion designer who died in 2000 at the age of 55 from Poems syndrome, a rare cancer. The book was put together by Zack's brother George, an actor and filmmaker, after Zack died. Zack briefly had his own collection but is best known within the fashion industry for working as the head designer at Calvin Klein in the 70's, 80's and 90's, when Zack's signature take on simple luxury and glamour was the defining style of the Calvin Klein collections.
The book is an entertaining collage of diaries, photographs, sketches, and post cards which celebrates Zack's really great taste and the icons who shaped his sense of American style – for example Jackie Onassis, Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Taylor and Georgia O'Keefe -

Zack with Calvin Klein

and with Grace Coddington, who was the Creative Director at Calvin Klein before she went to work for Anna Wintour at Vogue -

"I am the only one who can make my life work."

Zack's quintessential American taste combined elegant sophistication with streamlined simplicity, and the book inspires me. Years later at a party I met Zack's brother George Carr. In typical New York City fashion, it turns out that George lives across the street from us.
Recently George invited me to see a new collection of clothes that he has launched for men and women called Carr which is drawn from Zack's sketches. In his showroom, George explained that at the onset of his illness, Zack became paralyzed almost overnight and that the only thing he could continue to do was sketch, so he filled hundreds of Hermes notebooks with drawings of his designs.

George now owns all of the notebooks and uses them as the basis for Carr. In the notebooks one can see the fluid, easy quality of Zack's style.

Some of the sketches are finished with vivid color. 

Zack's scrapbooks combined his favorite inspirations. Here is O'Keefe again, this time paired with Picasso.

From a sketchbook, a Picasso cubic painting on the left page and the red coat sketch on the right page inspired this Carr men's sweater knitted in an abstract pattern for Fall 2013.

On the men's side of the Carr showroom, George arranged shelves of inspiration. The Carr boys, including another brother Peter, grew up in Kerrville, Texas, so references include cow skulls and limestone rocks and Texas silver.

On the women's side, samples are arranged next to colorful sketches.

The men's collection is available exclusively at Saks Fifth Avenue, and the women's collection is sold to private clients. All of the clothes have the clean lines and comfortable ease of Zack's drawings. Gone but not forgotten thanks to his brother George, Zack Carr's quest for beauty and a spectacularly stylish life goes on.