Carolina Herrera Creative Director Wes Gordon Finds Inspiration in Rose Cumming's Glorious Fabrics
I think there’s a common characteristic among fashion designers, and that is their escapism is interiors,” opines Wes Gordon, the recently appointed creative director of Carolina Herrera. While he was sprucing up his new office last year, a Rose Cumming fabric swatch swept across his desk. In a moment of magnificent creative cross-pollination, the legendary decorator’s bold prints would manifest themselves not on furniture but on every swimsuit, espadrille, and dress in his charming pre-fall collection.
“The spirit Cumming had of breaking this very academic approach and mixing periods and styles was what made her so modern,” he notes. “Her work was really radical for the time.” Take her Manhattan townhouse’s iconic “ugly room,” which she patterned with monkeys, snakes, and other motifs deemed garish in her day. “So often, people confuse good taste and chic,” Gordon adds. “Good taste is really quite boring, whereas chic is flirting with bad taste and good and combining the two. She did that in a really fabulous way.”
After poring over Cumming’s early–20th century rooms for American aristocrats and Hollywood royalty like Marlene Dietrich and Mary Pickford, Gordon reached out to Dessin Fournir, keeper of the decorator’s textile designs, and arranged a meeting with its founder, Chuck Comeau. “I was ready to make a big pitch, but he immediately said yes,” Gordon recalls with amusement. (As it turned out, Comeau’s wife’s favorite brand is Carolina Herrera.) The stars aligning, Gordon traveled to the company’s Kansas headquarters, where he unearthed an Aladdin’s cave of archival treasures, including hand-painted swatches that had never been produced. “We were working off scraps in some cases, scanning, creating the repeat,” and, when samples had faded, “boosting the colors.” For an added flourish, Gordon splashed Cumming’s scripted signature across each piece in the collection. As he explains, “Carolina Herrera being founded by a strong, confident New York woman, it felt like fate in a way.” carolinaherrera.com
