How can you be a fashion icon (not wearing clothes)?

Designer Carolina Herrera stands next to an inspiration board in her New York showroom. (Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post)
NEW YORK — Designer Carolina Herrera, wearing a well-tailored, cream-colored dress and a bouquet of lavender brooches, strides into her office on Seventh Avenue with the elongated posture of a dancer. She has fresh-from-the-salon hair that belies the day’s spitting rain. She wears a discreet hint of lipstick. She looks pristine, unhurried and genteel. There are a lot of designers who choose bland attire — T-shirts and jeans, basic black jersey — as a kind of camouflage. They don’t want to distract from the glory of their collection. Herrera serves as a template, a role model, for the woman who buys her clothes — or at least whom that woman aspires to be.
Herrera maintains a sharp eye for the details that can spoil a look: the stray hair, a skirt that wrinkles across the hips, the bodice that strains against its buttons. Her style is not fussy or old-fashioned, but it is formal. It is considered. Herrera, after all, believes that every woman should own a dress, a pencil skirt and an evening gown.
Herrera’s style stands out in our aggressively informal times. To attend a runway show for her signature collection is to be swept into a room filled with social swells, wealthy shoppers and ladies with foreign accents and terribly convoluted names suggesting nobility somewhere in the upper branches of their family tree.
This is the world out of which Herrera herself emerged, more than 30 years ago, at the age of 40, to launch her own ready-to-wear collection. She was born into wealth in Venezuela and married into Spanish nobility. Over the years, she has built a Seventh Avenue-based company that includes her signature line, epitomized by the elegant evening dresses that appear regularly at red carpet occasions, as well as fragrances, bridal gowns and a secondary collection, CH Carolina Herrera. She will open a boutique for her CH Carolina Herrera label, with its range of men’s and women’s sportswear, cocktail attire and accessories, at CityCenterDC on June 9, joining a host of other designer brands from Canali and Paul Stuart to Hermès.
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