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."