Last night we ripped open our first New York fashion week invitation— from Jason Wu. It’s an entire month before his February 13 show, which will be at Exit Art. Could it be that the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist is so on the ball because he’s been hard at work on a special dress for [...]

More bad news on the fashion front: Obedient Sons & Daughters is closing its doors, but the recession isn’t necessarily to blame. Swaim and Christina Hutson’s profile has been on a fast-moving upward trajectory since they launched their label over two years ago: They were CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalists last year. Unfortunately, their investor hasn’t [...]

Juan Carlos Obando thinks different. How different? When asked on his CFDA/Vogue application for his ideal business mentor, the Los Angeles-based designer went out on a limb and nominated Steve Jobs. What the Apple impresario could teach a maker of exquisitely hand-detailed gowns isn’t clear—at least not at first blush. But for Obando, who sidestepped [...]

Albertus Swanepoel has been through this before. When the South African designer arrived in the United States in 1989, he was flying high—his apparel had earned him a Coty Award back home. Once in New York, he easily secured a design position at one of the local houses. Then came the recession. The early nineties [...]

Women love shoes. It’s a love affair that’s been chronicled in detail over the course of six television seasons and one feature film edition of Sex and the City, so there’s really no need to belabor the point. A more interesting matter is wondering what new designer, if any, might find his
footwear fetishized by a [...]

Every morning, Irene Neuwirth gets up and goes swimming in the ocean near her Venice Beach home. But it’s no mere hobby for the jewelry designer. Since debuting her first collection of fine jewelry eight years ago, Neuwirth has looked to the water for inspiration and reflected its power and shape-shifting beauty in her designs. [...]

Richard Chai has paid his dues. Prior to launching his eponymous line in 2004, the New York-based designer had worked with everyone from Geoffrey Beene (interning under Alber Elbaz) to Donna Karan (at DKNY) to Marc Jacobs (as the design director who launched the Marc by Marc Jacobs’ diffusion lines.) From the beginning, Chai put [...]

Sophie Buhai and Lisa Mayock have come a long way from the living room. Back in 2003, the freshly minted Parsons grads set up shop in the apartment they shared in Brooklyn and began mashing up ideas for their new brand, Vena Cava. In the years since, a healthy sense of eclecticism has served the [...]

Jason Wu likes to say that his first fashion experience was as “a small-scale patternmaker.” Small indeed: While still in high school, Wu launched a career as a doll designer. This might make for nothing more than some interesting trivia, were it not for the fact that Wu continues to demonstrate an interest in the [...]

When Swaim Hutson launched Obedient Sons in 2002, he never anticipated that some of the most loyal fans of his new menswear line would turn out to be women. Together with wife Christina, Hutson made Obedient Sons into both a closet standby for well-dressed men, and a brand that inspires selective nicking by wives and [...]