HERRERA her two sisters were raised. Though she soaked up knowledge subliminally while looking at her mother’s pretty clothes, Herrera’s conscious self was far more concerned with studying the pursuits of a well-bred young lady, both intellectual, such as art and history, and active — riding and tennis. For years, she quips, her tennis instructor was the most important person in her life. She also took cues from her governess, a refined Hungarian woman who taught her French and English. As a teenager, Herrera began to explore style as an interest and fodder for experimentation; she has often said that when she discovered American screen sirens, she wanted to be a vamp. All of that combined with good old-fashioned luck — she’s gorgeous — coalesced into Herrera’s signature glamour, worn with white-shirted control and impeccable carriage. And very naturally. Herrera seems, in every discernible way, devoid of artifice. As she and her second husband, Reinaldo Herrera, traveled, often to New York, they became regulars at haunts including Studio 54, and she, on the international society pages. “That was so much fun, New York in the Seventies,” she says. “You were mixed with a lot of creative people, talent, in the art world, in society, literature, in the movie business. Actors, actresses, musicians, they were all mixed. You used to go to dinners and find everybody together. It was fun. I loved it.” At some point during her enviable itinerant ways, Herrera decided she had something to offer women like herself in terms of fashion, chic women with tony lifestyles. She wanted to open a fashion house. Her friend Halston, who by then had experienced a series of woes, advised her otherwise. “What did you drink, are you mad? You can’t!” he admonished. Undeterred, Herrera forged on. Just past 40 and the mother of four daughters, she would forge an enviable life as a working woman, achieving what appears from the outside a near perfect work-life balance. In aggregate, her daughters Mercedes, Ana Luisa, Carolina and Patricia have made her a grandmother 12 times over (each has three children), and surely the most glamorous great-grandmother on Earth — a status about which Herrera makes no effort to hide. “Why should I?” she muses. “I don’t avoid it. I think every age has benefits and limitations. No? You should try to develop each one at the proper time.” About the time Herrera was mulling opening a business (counseled in the affirmative by none other than Diana Vreeland, a family friend), she attended a party. Someone pointed out Armando de Armas, the publishing magnate whose Miami-based portfolio included the Spanish language Harper’s Bazaar. A recent cover of the magazine had featured a paparazzi photo of Herrera. She went over to thank him, and before the conversation was over, he had offered to invest in her still nonexistent business. Herrera staged her first show at the Metropolitan Club for fall 1981, with a band playing Cole Porter. Steve Rubell was turned away at the door for want of a necktie; he returned and was welcomed after a quick Bergdorf Goodman run. All of the big stores — Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf’s, Saks Fifth Avenue — came and wrote orders. Despite the seeming worldliness of her operation, as a businessperson, Herrera was green. She recalls of her first trunk show that she didn’t grasp the lingo: “I didn’t know it was called a trunk show because you transported the clothes in a trunk.” She also had to turn down an offer of windows from the legendary Park Avenue retailer Martha. Before the Metropolitan show, Herrera had worked up a small collection “with 20
“It is a great privilege to fête 35 years of Herrera’s timeless elegance, and to engage SCAD students with a designer par excellence,” said Paula Wallace. “Her artistry reflects a refined sensibility that is at once classic and modern. Every woman who wears her designs feels exactly as Carolina intends: beautiful.” HERRERA Illustration used with permission of David Downton. 21
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