Beige satin ankle length dress with large puffed draped sleeves to elbow, gathered waist

Carolina Herrera

born 1939

BiographyCarolina Herrera once recalled how her friends Halston and Bill Blass were initially incredulous at her decision to enter the difficult and uncertain world of fashion design. Prior to the debut of her first runway collection in 1981, the aristocratic Venezuelan beauty had long been one of society’s best dressed. However, her first collections appeared at a time when “dressing up” was “the new order of the day,” as the New York Times put it, and Herrera’s lavish evening clothes fit this social climate well.

Sleeves feature prominently in Herrera’s work, as they do in her own wardrobe. Her sleeves are so distinctive, in fact, that early on, Women’s Wear Daily characterized Herrera as “Our Lady of the Sleeves.” She told the New York Times in 1980 that while a woman is seated, “what is most important is everything that can be seen from the waist up. That is why I pay so much attention to sleeves. They make you important.” This understanding of a particular lifestyle enabled Herrera to dress many distinguished women, her friend Jacqueline Onassis among them.

Journalist John Duka observed that Herrera, at the end of a November 1981 runway show, “moved with the assurance of someone who had wrestled with a reputation as a dilettante and won.” Over the course of a career that has spanned thirty years (with no end yet in sight), Herrera has unquestionably proven herself as a designer who understands all women, and not merely the well-heeled.

Herrera’s personal style and her designs go hand-in-hand; both are crisp, polished, and elegant, and her work is beautifully tailored and impeccably finished. In her own words, she creates clothing that is “very feminine with a certain chic; classic in a modern way.” The industry agrees: in 2004, the Council of Fashion Designers of America named her Women’s Wear Designer of the Year.

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