Thirty-seven years after presenting her first collection at the tony Metropolitan Club, Carolina Herrera will present her last, at the Museum of Modern Art this Monday night. The designer will continue to be a global brand ambassador for her namesake brand; the Chicago-born, Atlanta-raised Wes Gordon, who has been consulting for the house, will become its creative director.
A golden-haired Venezuelan of distinguished taste and noted for her beauty, Herrera debuted on the International Best Dressed List in 1972; she made the Hall of Fame in 1980, the year she moved to New York. Though Herrera’s elegance is distinctly uptown and ladylike, her interests, and circle, are Catholic. She counted both the boundary-pushing Robert Mapplethorpe and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as friends. Women’s Wear Daily famously dubbed the designer “Our Lady of the Sleeve” after seeing her debut collection, which expectedly had its fair share of ’80s excess. The longevity of the label, though, can be credited to the unstuffiness of Herrera’s designs.
Elegant is the adjective that comes to mind in connection with Herrera and her work, but practicality has its place, too. The designer’s day “uniform”—white shirt and black skirt—is both polished and relatable, as are the looks developed for her runway: An evening gown or ball skirt might have pockets, for example. Over time, Herrera added novelty prints to her repertoire; these ranged from abstract divers, to radishes inspired by a scarf by Paul Poiret, to clovers.
The clover print nods, of course, to the embroidered ones Herrera strewed over Caroline Kennedy’s wedding gown, in honor of her Irish heritage. The response to this design was so overwhelming that the designer introduced a bridal line the next year, in 1987. To be a “Carolina bride” is to align oneself with taste and charm. Herrera won over New York upon her arrival here, then went on to collect scads of awards from her colleagues, including the CFDA’s Womenswear Designer of the Year in 2004 and its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement prize in 2008.
As the designer takes on a new role at the company, we celebrate her many achievements with a look back at her work as it appeared in the pages of Vogue.