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March 6, 2008 12:15 pm
Victoria Bartlett used to have an uneasy relationship with supply and demand. “Oh God, you know, sometimes there would be a piece that I loved, loved, loved, that the editors adored, and the stylists—and no one would buy it,” the VPL designer recalls. “Heartbreaking. But now I figure, give the people what they want.” It’s not that Bartlett has decided to dumb down her singular vision—she is, after all, Steven Klein’s favorite stylist, a 2007 CFDA/Vogue finalist, and the original secret genius behind Prada Sport, so Bartlett tends to trust her gut. Since launching VPL in 2003, however, she’s absorbed a steady dose of retail reality, noting that, year in and year out, there were a few key pieces of her utilitarian chic underpinnings that buyers just couldn’t wait to get their hands on. Hence, the soft launch of VPL Two, which is not so much a diffusion line as it is a tight edit of recurring VPL essentials. Now entering its third season, VPL Two earned Bartlett yet another nod of approval from the CFDA last month, when the organization gifted her one of its two booths at the Designers & Agents markets in New York and L.A. “It’s been very freeing, having the VPL Two range in place,” Bartlett explains. “There’s an outlet for the VPL fundamentals, pieces that have always been key not only to the retail success of the brand, but to its aesthetic. And with that in place, it lets me be more adventurous with the primary VPL line—collaborating with jewelry designers, for example, expanding the knitwear, and continuing to make the pieces I want to make, even if I suspect they’ll be less commercial.” Bartlett has an addendum to that last thought, however: “One of these days, hopefully soon, I’m going to have my own store. And I’ll stock all those ‘less commercial’ pieces,” she muses. “And I bet you anything—they’ll sell. They’ll fly right off the racks.”
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