Fashion Icon Says Goodbye Amid Departure Intrigue: Inside the Fashion Week Drama, Chills and Tears of Carolina Herrera

NEW YORK — After 37 years — a lifetime in fashion — Carolina Herrera has made her final runway bow. The glamorous Venezuelan-born designer, who founded her namesake line in 1981, showed her last collection at New York Fashion Week and there was a lot of nostalgia, along with quite a few tears, at the Museum of Modern Art, where the show unfurled with a touching runway finale.

At the end of the show, 19 models came out, each wearing a signature white shirt — it’s a look that Herrera has popularized over the years and always wears when she makes her runway bow —  and a floor-sweeping taffeta skirt, each in a bold color.

“I always wear a white blouse, don’t ask me why,” Herrera told me when I interviewed her during a Houston visit in 2004. “It’s because I feel comfortable. You have to feel comfortable in whatever you are wearing. Fashion is about feeling natural.”

After the models left the runway, Herrera acknowledge the huge applause as she brought out her design team, all in white smocks. Her successor, 31-year-old Wes Gordon, who has been working with Herrera for most of the past year, gave her a big bouquet of red roses, and everyone smiled. (Houstonians might remember Gordon from his Fashion Houston appearance five years ago at the Wortham Center. A native of Atlanta, he interned with Tom Ford and Oscar de la Renta before launching his collection, which is now on hiatus.)

According to Women’s Wear Daily, however, there’s a bit of palace intrigue in Herrera’s departure. The Spanish fashion and fragrance group, Puig, which owns the Herrera brand, has been itching to install a new designer to replace the 79-year-old Herrera, who will become “global brand ambassador,” where she will be “promoting the CH brand and fragrance all over the world.” (There are CH Carolina Herrera stores in Houston’s Galleria and Dallas’ Northpark Center that feature lifestyle collections for men, women and children.)

Worldwide sales from Herrera’s clothing, accessories, and fragrances is said to total nearly $1.5 billion a year.

Gordon, who in his career has been labeled a “young Michael Kors” and a “modern-day Bill Blass,” seems like a good fit for the Herrera brand as he is known for creating designs highlighting rich colors, custom brocades and luxe quality. The fall collection features such Herrera touches as crisp separates, colorful print dresses, and evening gowns in an awning strip pattern but also no doubt showed Gordon’s influence in ostrich feathered skirts and coats and a red strapless  “Southern Belle” gown that shows quite a bit of cleavage.

Watching from the front row was Calvin Klein, who many years ago retired from creating his namesake brand, leaving it to successors Francisco Costa, and now, Raf Simons. With such well-known designers as Herrera, Klein and Donna Karan stepping back (along with the passing of Oscar de la Renta a few years back),  the torch is being passed to a new generation as American fashion looks to the future.