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Army Toe Shoe Ban: Latest in Armed Forces Fashion Regulation

Today, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Army had banned those shoes with the toes built in, which you either hate or own. “The glovelike shoes, with individual sections for individual toes, are supposed to simulate the experience of being barefoot and, enthusiasts say, reduce the likelihood of injuries. But in a notice this month, the Army said that the shoes were not becoming, and that its policy would henceforth be modified.” It seemed like an exceptionally specific item of clothing for the brass to bother with banning, but that’s the kind of thing that is often at the center of dress-code debates in military or paramilitary institutions. Here are a few other examples.

• Polyester for the Marines: The corps decided in 2006 to ban polyester or nylon clothing in off-base operations or in forward bases where marines might come into combat or be exposed to fire. The reasoning was that the material posed a much higher burn hazard that other, non-synthetic fibers. Marines were disappointed because some synthetics designed specifically for the heat were really comfortable to wear in Iraq, but most agreed the horrible burns were worth avoiding.
• Shorts for the Capitol Police: With summer underway and record-high temperatures already recorded in Washington D.C., Capitol Police will definitely want to be taking advantage of the option to wear shorts with their uniforms. But those that work at the Capitol itself must forego their comfort for a professional demeanor. That means long pants. According to Roll Call, a police union spokesman said the reason for the ban was, “shorts-clad officers do not look good carrying large automatic rifles.”
• Fatigues for soldiers working in the Pentagon: Given that soldiers’ nickname for their combat uniform is “pajamas,” according to Fox, it kind of makes sense the brass doesn’t want them worn in the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld reportedly dropped a restriction on wearing the uniforms inside the nation’s military command center, allowing fatigues inside to remind personnel that the country was at war. But earlier this month it was reinstated, and come October, soldiers must wear their dress uniforms when inside the building.
• Berets for the Army: Along with the tightening of the Pentagon dress code, the Army loosened up a bit this month, doing away with the hated beret as its uniform headgear and going back to the patrol cap. The move came after a vote by the rank and file, which overwhelmingly decided to do away with the hot, non-breathable berets. Special forces, Rangers, and Airborne units will still wear their traditional berets, but they’re tough, and can take it.
• Skirts for the Navy: Rather than a requirement being imposed, this one was lifted. For the first time since women entered the service in 1908, the Navy in 2004 lifted a requirement that they wear skirts as part of their uniforms. According to USA Today, “Women can still choose to wear skirts, which come in colors that vary according to rank and sometimes the season. But until the new rules went into effect this month, they had to maintain skirts in their sea bags and could be ordered to wear them for special events such as change-of-command and retirement ceremonies.”

Want to add to this story? Comment below or send the author of this post, Adam Martin, an email. Have a hot tip or story idea? Let us know on the Open Wire.

15 Celebrity Moms Without Makeup: They’re Just Like Us! (Before & After Photos)

Mary writes a humor blog, called The Mommyologist, all about the changes in life that go along with being a parent. She loves to travel, and enjoys trying out different martini recipes on weekends. She lives in Connecticut with her husband of almost 7 years and her 4-year-old son.

Sunny Chanel resides in San Francisco with her husband, daughter, beagle and a tarantula named Lulu. She has strung words together for the SF Weekly, Bust, and Jane among others and currently writes for Babble’s Famecrawler and Strollerderby blog.

Shell is outnumbered in a house of three little boys and her husband of seven years. She lives in North Carolina and is a beach girl. Her blog, Things I Can’t Say, is an honest look at family life.

Wendy Michaels enjoys her career as an entertainment writer, covering the celeb buzz at the TV Crunch and Movie Crunch blogs. She loves celebrity gossip on any level, from A-listers right down to those pesky reality stars. Wendy lives in Central New York, where she enjoys time with her husband and two children.

Maria Lianos is publisher/editor of A Mother World. She’s slightly addicted to blogging and lives for social media but her two rambunctious boys remind her to go offline from time to time to enjoy things IRL.

Michelle Lamar is a celeb-obsessed geeky mom of two girls. Her daughters are living proof that karma is real and when she’s not dishing it up on Famecrawler, you can find her online at V3 Integrated Marketing or on Huffington Post. Addicted to Twitter (@michellelamar ) as well as her iPhone. Michelle is on a lifelong quest to find the perfect Margarita.

Emma Brady has been the publisher of Celebrity Moms — where celebrity and parenthood collide — since January 2006. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her husband, two sons, mother-in-law, dog, and cat. When not following the news and trends of Hollywood, Emma works as a business consultant and freelance business writer.

Danielle Sullivan is the mom of three, editor by trade, writer at heart, and native New Yorker. She has worked as an editor and writer in the parenting magazine world for over 10 years. When not on the little league field, at a school event or in a pediatrician’s waiting room, Danielle can be found listening to a Dave Matthews song and writing away at her computer. Danielle writes for Babble’s Famecrawler and Strollerderby blog. Her own blog Just Write Mom is an account of the writing life after abandoning the corporate world.

15 Celebrity Moms Without Makeup: They’re Just Like Us! (Before & After Photos)

Mary writes a humor blog, called The Mommyologist, all about the changes in life that go along with being a parent. She loves to travel, and enjoys trying out different martini recipes on weekends. She lives in Connecticut with her husband of almost 7 years and her 4-year-old son.

Sunny Chanel resides in San Francisco with her husband, daughter, beagle and a tarantula named Lulu. She has strung words together for the SF Weekly, Bust, and Jane among others and currently writes for Babble’s Famecrawler and Strollerderby blog.

Shell is outnumbered in a house of three little boys and her husband of seven years. She lives in North Carolina and is a beach girl. Her blog, Things I Can’t Say, is an honest look at family life.

Wendy Michaels enjoys her career as an entertainment writer, covering the celeb buzz at the TV Crunch and Movie Crunch blogs. She loves celebrity gossip on any level, from A-listers right down to those pesky reality stars. Wendy lives in Central New York, where she enjoys time with her husband and two children.

Maria Lianos is publisher/editor of A Mother World. She’s slightly addicted to blogging and lives for social media but her two rambunctious boys remind her to go offline from time to time to enjoy things IRL.

Michelle Lamar is a celeb-obsessed geeky mom of two girls. Her daughters are living proof that karma is real and when she’s not dishing it up on Famecrawler, you can find her online at V3 Integrated Marketing or on Huffington Post. Addicted to Twitter (@michellelamar ) as well as her iPhone. Michelle is on a lifelong quest to find the perfect Margarita.

Emma Brady has been the publisher of Celebrity Moms — where celebrity and parenthood collide — since January 2006. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her husband, two sons, mother-in-law, dog, and cat. When not following the news and trends of Hollywood, Emma works as a business consultant and freelance business writer.

Danielle Sullivan is the mom of three, editor by trade, writer at heart, and native New Yorker. She has worked as an editor and writer in the parenting magazine world for over 10 years. When not on the little league field, at a school event or in a pediatrician’s waiting room, Danielle can be found listening to a Dave Matthews song and writing away at her computer. Danielle writes for Babble’s Famecrawler and Strollerderby blog. Her own blog Just Write Mom is an account of the writing life after abandoning the corporate world.

Saint Martins’ fashion grads can connect the dots

By SYLVIA HUI, Associated Press
–
20 hours ago

LONDON (AP) — A shabby community sports hall doesn’t seem like the place for London’s fashion elite to gather for a show by a bunch of 22-year-olds.

But these aren’t just any kids — and the host isn’t your basic local college.

It’s the slick and professional annual presentation for bachelor’s degree students at Central Saint Martins, one of the world’s best fashion schools.

Few fashion schools can claim the network of support that Saint Martins enjoys. It was the launch pad of Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton, John Galliano, Christopher Kane and Stella McCartney, and it’s those connections that help nurture future stars.

While the 40 designers dressing models backstage last month in their final-project collections are unknown students, there’s an impressive lineup off the catwalk eager to cheer them on.

Kane, Britain’s hottest young designer, is on the judging panel. Seated among the audience of proud parents and school friends is Burton, creative director of the house of McQueen and designer of Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. They’re joined by executives from fashion giants Lanvin and HM, not to mention the best of the industry press.

As the seats fill up there’s a buzz of excitement and anticipation, but the pressure seems to energize, not faze, the students.

“I always feel confident about my clothes,” said Nicholas Aburn, 22, moments before the show. Aburn, who came to London from outside Baltimore, won the first runner-up prize later in the night with his sharply tailored, 80′s-inspired feminine styles.

Although it’s best known as a fashion school (originally called just Saint Martins and founded in 1854) the London college has been home to a range of courses, including drama and music, since it merged with the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1989.

The school has an impressive list of alumni: actor Colin Firth, painter Lucian Freud, film director Mike Leigh and Sex Pistols bass player Glen Matlock to name a few.

The famous names not only burnish the college’s reputation but are key to its continued success.

In fashion, more than the other streams, Saint Martins graduates are everywhere at the highest level of the industry, including numerous others who work behind the scenes for some of the world’s most storied ateliers: Christian Dior, Chloe and Marc Jacobs among them.

The school’s prestigious alumni can offer to fresh graduates what few others can — a paycheck once they complete their studies for one. The opportunities are a powerful magnet for the brightest, most ambitious young designers around the world.

That, in turn, attracts sponsorship for shows and student projects that feed the school’s reputation. This year’s undergraduate fashion show, for example, looked so glossy partly because it received sponsorship from beauty megabrand L’Oreal.

In an industry where you can live off your looks and connections for quite a while, that gives Saint Martins an extra edge.

Many students gain a real feel of the fashion business long before they leave school, which may explain why they appear so mature and self-possessed for their tender age. Burton, who graduated from the college in 1998, interned with McQueen while at the school.

Her tutor at the time “gave you this brilliant attitude of ‘just get on with it’,” Burton told reporters at the school’s annual show. “It was very much survival of the fittest at Central Saint Martins, which is a good thing, really.”

The bar is set high for the admission process. Willie Walters, director for the undergraduate fashion course, said that enrollment for womenswear — the most popular stream — was so competitive only about one in 38 applicants was admitted this year. And that’s just the first hurdle. Once they’re in, they need to work to the top half of the class to get the chance to present their final collections to the press and fashion executives.

“Perfection is expected at Central Saint Martins — but we’ll support them in their endeavor,” said Walters, who has taught hundreds of students since 1998. “The press will scrutinize the designs. If the clothes are not immaculate, they would say so.”

Still, Walters said the undergraduate degree allows more room for “rough diamonds” and is not as demanding as the master’s fashion course, which is famously exacting and showcases alongside top brands at Fashion Week.

It was during his master’s show, in 1992, that McQueen first wowed the fashion world with his exquisite tailoring and daring designs.

The students appreciate the tough love, and they say the staff manages to focus on a magic mix of creativity, technical knowledge and commercial savvy. They like how there’s an emphasis on experimentation and the more artsy side of things, as well as the bread-and-butter of how to put together a garment.

“The teachers push you very hard, so that’s good. They know how it works in the real world,” said 28-year-old Rym Jarbouai, who recently graduated from a Saint Martins course on pattern cutting to start her online business selling handmade bags. Having studied fashion in both Paris and London, Jarbouai said the school helped her take concrete steps, whereas she found the emphasis in Paris was more on ideas and “visits to museums.”

So, do teachers from the start know who’ll be the next sensation — the next McQueen or McCartney?

Absolutely not, Walters said. It’s one thing to show great talent in their graduate collections and quite another to have the charisma, business sense and “skills to make it in the real world” as an own-label designer.

And even if she had a hunch about spotting fashion’s next buzz-worthy star, she insists on keeping mum.

“It’s an awful cross to bear, being the next big thing,” Walters said. “I can’t say, but I’ll have it in my heart.”

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

What Not to Wear

Ideas

What Not to Wear
Alexander McQueen gets the museum treatment.

A few minutes into “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” I suddenly realized what it reminded me of: a nineteenth-century side-show, the sort of collection of sensational curiosities that P.T. Barnum brought together in the earliest form of the American museum. It’s an interesting instance of the institution coming full circle. Ever since Thomas Hoving, the Met’s flamboyant director in the 1960s, began aggressively marketing the museum to the populace through blockbuster shows, we’ve been making our way back to Barnum.

   

• “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” Through August 7. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

For a long stretch, of course, art museums sought to distance themselves from their side-show origins. They represented an elite enclave of taste and sobriety, and even the artistic avant garde maintained a certain kind of respectability. Consider the cutting-edge early modern art collection of Etta and Claribel Cone now housed in the Baltimore Art Museum (some of it currently on display at New York City’s Jewish Museum), and the controversial collection of Albert Barnes that is now muscling its way out of Merion, Pennsylvania to downtown Philadelphia. If the works in these collections initially mystified viewers, they also led them, by way of formal innovation, to an understanding that both grew out of and revised a venerable artistic tradition.

Lately, however, the whole concept of art as a body of formal knowledge seems to have lost favor. Experts are increasingly replaced by impresarios and celebrities from the tabloids, and the exhibits themselves seem to be the stuff of the high-end marketplace. Having spent an afternoon only a few weeks ago at the Van Cleef and Arpels exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, I could see a resemblance between it and the McQueen show, as different in ostensible content as the two were. The Van Cleef and Arpels exhibit was essentially an ad for a tony jewelry store, while the McQueen show is a postmodern Madame Tussaud’s. Both are intended primarily to make you exclaim: “Look at that outrageous thing. Who could possibly wear it?” Then, when you realize that no one possibly could, you conclude that the thing must be art.

McQueen is quoted to have said that his clothing was an expression of his emotional life, without regard for the person who wears it. This strikes me as part of a general trend in which a practitioner, once supposed to serve people (in this case, to clothe them) ends up serving himself. My own field is not immune to this trend.  Literary critics initially conceived of themselves as handmaidens to literature; now they have mostly severed that connection and exist as spinners of theoretical ideas of their own. If you want an extreme analogy for this trend, think of a surgeon who, weary of treating patients, decides to engage in the intricate cutting of human flesh for the purpose of pursuing his surgical muse. This analogy, by the way, is strangely apt with regard to “Savage Beauty,” which features a set of frock coats named for that notorious cutter-up of human flesh, Jack the Ripper.

McQueen, admittedly, is not the first fashion designer to feature clothes that in being unwearable claim to achieve the status of art. Roberto Capucci’s show, “Art into Fashion,” recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, should have been titled “Fashion into Art.” It began with Capucci’s early wearable pieces and evolved into “studies in form,” exercises in textile geometry intended for mannequins, not women. Even McQueen doesn’t go this far; his garments have all, presumably, been shown on the runway, albeit on models that don’t look entirely human and whose health may have been seriously compromised in wearing them. 

There is no denying an inventive, wide-ranging imagination at work in the garments and accessories in the McQueen show. The collections on display, which span the designer’s brief career (he killed himself at age 40 in 2010), are divided according to the following themes: the Romantic Mind, Romantic Gothic, Romantic Nationalism, Romantic Exoticism, and Romantic Primitivism. I was struck by a number of pieces — first, those meticulously tailored frock coats, titled “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims,” and, nearby, a red dress decorated with stained microscopic slides in the manner of sequins. Also made the subject of a good deal of explanatory wall copy were McQueen’s “bumster pants,” trousers that fall below the line of the buttocks, which one of the “McQueenisms” scattered throughout the exhibit refers to as “the most erotic part of the body.” Personally, I would qualify this by saying that the upper buttocks is erotic on a supermodel but not on the guy who fixes my toilet.  I was most intrigued by McQueen’s 1995 line entitled “Highland Rape,” a series of tartan dresses that had been torn in various suggestive ways. An accompanying video showed live models staggering woozily down the runway in these tattered tartans as though just released from brutalizing captivity.

Other pieces that caught my attention: a spray-painted sheet dress, belted under the arms, with an accompanying video showing a live model wearing the dress and being violently spray-painted by robots; an array of accessories under the heading “Cabinet of Curiosities” (many commissioned for McQueen by jewelry artiste Shaun Leane) that included a wire-face clamp and cymbal-size earrings, as well as a molded leather body encasement suggestive of a naked torso that had been cut open and stitched back together. There was also an arm and hand piece made of armor — an ostensible tribute to Joan of Arc, but to me a high-tech variation on Michael Jackson’s white glove.

In order to put over this sort of thing, you have to give it political content — which is to say, render it politically correct and thereby reverse the message that it ostensibly sends of degrading and exploiting both women and the museum viewer gaping at it. The exhibit does this by deconstructing the ostensible message; i.e. the Jack the Ripper jacket is “a meditation on the dynamics of power, particularly between predator and prey,” as the curator Andrew Bolton puts it. Thus, in looking at it, you are presumably expressing your abhorrence of serial killing, though also your appreciation of fine tailoring. Likewise, the torn tartans are meant to decry the horrors of the Scottish Clearances, the forced displacement of the population of the Scottish Highlands by the English during the 18th and 19th centuries. As far as I could make out, these horrors, visited upon McQueen’s forbearers, may have something to do with the depressed state that led to his suicide. Nonetheless, one of the commentaries posted in the exhibit explained that he loved England, and particularly London. He also worked for many years for Givenchy, an exclusive couture house frequented by wealthy dowagers, many of whose ancestors may have been responsible for the aforesaid Clearances. The Romantic Exoticism collection displays a series of traditional Asian dresses, dramatically deconstructed. This made me wonder. More than three decades ago, Palestinian activist and Columbia professor Edward Said decried what he termed “Orientalism,” the Western tendency to turn the Easterner into an exotic other. Perhaps this is “a meditation on the exploitation of Western power.” Or perhaps it’s OK to be Orientalist if you do it with clothes, especially if they’re showcased in a special exhibit at the Met and includes visits from Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Colin Firth (who, having played both Mr. Darcy and King George VI, is given great latitude in everything).

But, then, if the exhibition seems to suffer from cognitive dissonance, so does the fashion industry as a whole. Open an issue of Vogue, whose editor Anna Wintour was a co-chair of the opening gala for “Savage Beauty,” and you’ll likely see an article decrying genital mutilation opposite an ad for shoes that seem to derive from “Orientalist” foot-binding. In the case of the McQueen show (which featured a number of seriously dangerous-looking shoes), the fashion was edgy and angry, but also expensive and preening, with an atmosphere that mixed the faux transgression of Eyes Wide Shut with something Herman Munster-ish (a Mozart adagio adjoined to fun house yowls).

The galleries were kept fairly dark and there was such a crush of people in front of the mannequins and videos that it was hard to catch everything. I did glimpse a gown made of mussel shells and one, featured on the catalogue cover, composed of flowers that fall off when worn — perhaps, to adapt Bolton, “a meditation on the dynamics of [flower]power.” There were a number of garments in the form of molded body casts (plastic and leather), and a dress in which the arms were caught up in a straightjacket roll of material — perfect for getting your daughter to stop biting her nails. I also joined the crowd gazing at the revolving balsa wood dress with wings that, as it turned, exposed the crotch area of the mannequin. The audio tour was free to children under 12. Yes, children under 12 were present, though a note did suggest that the exhibit might be inappropriate for children under 5; this, after all, is New York City. The gift shop offered a decorative model of McQueen’s Armadillo Shoe for $25, an Armadillo shoe refrigerator magnet for $5.95, and a “Savage Beauty” slim-fit T-shirt for $25.

All of us wandering through the exhibit (with the exception a smattering of knowing hipsters) appeared befuddled. Was I the only one wondering whether Sarah Jessica Parker, who wore some pretty crazy things on Sex and the City, would consider wearing the fitted suit made of pony skin with deer antlers coming out of the shoulders? If so, would that risk impaling her husband, Matthew Broderick, if he accidentally embraced her?

I would have liked to ask the curator why all the mannequins’ heads were encased in either black leather or burlap. The enshrouded faces were disturbing. They suggested bodies prepared for hanging, the method by which McQueen killed himself. Was this rendering a prescient idea the designer came up with before his demise, or was it an oblique homage on the part of the curator?

The allusions to literary and pop culture were fast and thick at the exhibition.  McQueen was an accomplished bricoleur, and if his allusions seem ultimately to evoke Sweeney Todd more than, say, the Marquis de Sade, with a dose of Shakespeare in Love and a dash of Beetlejuice, this would explain the extraordinary popularity of the exhibition. Many in attendance seem to have come to it after a Broadway matinee.

What the show does most of all, however, is reveal that people, myself included, are suckers for sensationalism, especially when it can be presented in the guise of art. Give us something titillating, add an A-list celebrity imprimatur, put it in a world-class museum, and you have a hit. Thomas Hoving understood this 45 years ago, and P.T. Barnum understood it a hundred years before that.

There is no denying that Alexander McQueen had the skills of an expert craftsman, the result of his training (repeatedly invoked) on Savile Row. He was initially employed by the venerable firm of Anderson Shepherd, where he later claimed to have stitched “I am a cunt” into the lining of one of Prince Charles’ jackets. The story sounds apocryphal — an example of McQueen’s genius for self-promotion, learned at the feet of his Milanese mentor Romeo Gigli, for whom he worked after Givenchy. I wonder what those fussy Savile Row tailors think about their former apprentice now. And I wonder how they feel about the deluge of pierced, tattooed McQueen wannabes descending on their stodgy premises in the hope of gaining the expert tailoring skills that characterized their idol.

McQueen’s imagination was, according to the catalogue copy, romantic (which is a current euphemism for morbid). That he killed himself suggests that he was sincere in pursuing his aesthetic to its limits. He follows on the heels of artists like Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and David Foster Wallace, whose deaths, by seeming to authenticate their vision, catapulted them to iconic status and substantially boosted their sales. The fashion industry can use McQueen’s death in any number of ways — to promote his work, elevate others, and, more generally, flatter itself. Fashion, after all, suffers from an inferiority complex as an art form; until recently, it wasn’t considered one. From this perspective alone, McQueen’s death has gained his industry a new level of respectability. 

Suicide or not, I see the show as less an authentic artistic vision than a brilliant piece of marketing, especially when one considers that the same house that produced bumsters and rape tartans also made that most demurely bourgeois of garments: Kate Middleton’s wedding gown. That dress — and even more, the dramatically simple little number worn by her sister Pippa — are also examples of sartorial art. But with the added benefit of being wearable — and flattering the wearer. • 29 June 2011

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Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University and host of The Drexel InterView, a talk show broadcast on over 300 public television stations across the country. She is author of four nonfiction books and four bestselling novels, including Jane Austen in Boca and Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death, and the SATs. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. Her latest book is What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Jack the Ripper and Henry James. She can be reached at cohenpm@drexel.edu.

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Images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

See Nicole Richie’s New House of Harlow Bags! Tweet Her!

Nicole Richie is quite the little fashion mogul in the making, and she’s expanding the House of Harlow 1960 empire with a real money maker: handbags. Richie certainly stays true to the LA bred boho meets Studio 54 style she tends to rock and the new 14-piece collection reflects that.

With fringe details, studs, velvet, jaguar hardware, and ponyhair, it seems the line isn’t about that once bag for the seasons so much as adding a statement to a look.

“When I design, I always try to design pieces that are universal, meaning anyone can wear and carry it. At this stage of my design process, I really try to gather direct feedback from my customers, whether through in-store personal appearances, my Web site, Twitter or Facebook,” Richie tells WWD, “It really helps me when they provide me with their desires, feedback and comments on what they are looking for, so I can try my best to cater to their needs, yet stay true to the brand’s identity.” In other words, you better Tweet her if you don’t dig these.

The collection ranges in price from $150 to $625 for ponyhair and will be on sale at Shopbop, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman in July.

Vince Camuto: Nine West’s founder looks back

Today Camuto, 75, has an eponymous fashion line and designs footwear for other brands.

FORTUNE — Vince Camuto tells Fortune how he went from shoe clerk to legend of the fashion footwear industry.

My father was an artisan who died when I was 2, so I was always self-supporting and helping my mom. I grew up in Manhattan, and after high school I became a service manager at I. Miller, a fashionable store that sold women’s footwear and accessories in the early ’60s. Later, when I started selling in the store, all the ladies whom I’d met in the service area wanted to buy from me. They were starlets, professional models, and wealthy women.

I started sketching shoes in my early twenties, and I met Ted Poland, founder of Sudbury Shoe Co., who became my mentor. I was hired as a fashion merchandiser in Miami for National Shoe, then took over a Sudbury factory that wasn’t doing well. I designed, produced, and sold the collection, and the factory went into the black. Then I became president of the import division for Beck Industries, a footwear retailer.

In 1969 I was getting several offers when Bank of Sumitomo in New York asked me to start a business in Brazil, designing and importing private-label shoes. The bank wanted to diversify its investments, and Brazil had an incredible factory base. I liked the idea of building something new, so I took it.

In the ’70s I met Jerome Fisher, who was also a contractor for Sumitomo. We started our own company and marketed ourselves as having Japanese financing, Italian design, and Brazilian manufacturing. In 1979 we moved to 9 West 57th Street and were trying to decide on a name for our label. I looked out the window, saw the number 9, and said, “Let’s call ourselves Nine West.”

We wanted to give women shoes with great style while keeping prices low. We became a hot brand, opened retail stores, and owned the entry-level customer. Ten years later we repositioned the brand to attract a higher-level customer.

We were among the first to offer department stores the opportunity to put a brand concept shop within their store. We made acquisitions and were opening 125 stores a year under Nine West, Easy Spirit, and various outlets. Nine West was valued at $2 billion in 1999, when we decided to sell to Jones Apparel Group. It wasn’t easy being CEO, the creative director, and handling Wall Street. Still, selling Nine West was the hardest decision of my career because I was so committed to what we had built.

A week after my two-year noncompete period ended with Jones Apparel, my friend Alex Dillard [president of Dillard's Inc. (DDS, Fortune 500)] asked me to help with their brands, so we developed seven labels for Dillard’s department stores.

We’re now the Camuto Group. The first footwear license we bought was for fashion line BCBG. Then, in 2005, we paid $15 million for the master license to Jessica Simpson. Today the revenue for that line is about $750 million, and we’ve expanded it to 22 categories. In the last year we had at least 35 celebrities ask us to design their brands, but we’re on to the next wave.

Now we’re building Vince Camuto into a lifestyle brand that’s about affordable, beautiful luxury. We’ve got nine categories, from footwear to jewelry, with more coming. In 2010 we took in $2.5 billion at retail across all brands and categories. We also provide design and production services for 5,400 department stores and retailers throughout the world. We attract young designers and put the right teams together to design a line. The business is a love affair for me. I love the shoes, the fashion, and the people.  

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