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nytimes
February 22, 2007
A Short Walk to the Red Carpet
William Mebane for The New York Times
Keren Craig, left, and Georgina Chapman, the designers at Marchesa.
By RUTH LA FERLA
THE story has the shimmer of a fairy tale. Two years ago Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig were sitting on their haunches in Ms. Chapman’s London flat, pinning hems and poring over sketches for Marchesa, their fledgling fashion line.
Within a year, and with no fashion credentials to boast of, Ms. Chapman and Ms. Craig had decamped for Hollywood, where they were stunned, they say, to see their extravagantly sparkly evening dresses enhancing the contours of Cate Blanchett, Scarlett Johansson, Felicity Huffman, Anne Hathaway and Penélope Cruz.
At the Golden Globes last month, Jennifer Lopez and Sienna Miller paraded the designers’ effusively draped and decorated gowns.
That sterling track record has the fashion world swooning, and sniping, by turns. “Right now there is a buzz around those girls,” said Sally Singer, the fashion features director of Vogue. “Because their collection is popping up on all the right people, it has become part of a club. People want to wear them.”
But others in the fashion industry offer a simpler explanation for Marchesa’s red carpet blitz: Ms. Chapman is dating the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who produced films in which some of the actresses wearing Marchesa have starred, or may employ in the future. Whatever the explanation, it seems likely that another stellar roster of nominees and presenters at the Oscars on Sunday will appear in Marchesa.
At the moment, the designers are mum. “We won’t know any more than you do who will wear our clothes until we actually see them on television on the red carpet,” Ms. Craig said with practiced diplomacy. “We’re biting our nails, just waiting and hoping.” The approach of the Oscars has placed a spotlight on Marchesa and is attracting that particular venom the fashion industry reserves for upstarts, outsiders and the suspiciously well connected.
Hollywood power stylists, designers and influential editors, few of whom would speak on the record for fear of offending Mr. Weinstein, say that Ms. Craig and Ms. Chapman, both 30, have yet to earn their laurels. “People are asking, ‘How is it these two young gals with nothing but a lot of money behind them can put themselves out there as a brand,’ ” said Patricia Black, the director of a fashion showroom in New York, who stresses that she does not share that view.
Giuseppe Cipriani and Steven C. Witkoff, partners in the Witkoff Group real estate company in Manhattan, are Marchesa’s high-powered investors. Mr. Weinstein, too, has made timely contributions in amounts the company would not disclose. The Weinstein connection has been a source of gossip on the Internet and in the tabloids.
Fashion critics have not always been kind. In assessing the spring 2007 show last September, Women’s Wear Daily wrote that “amateurish overexuberance” had gotten the better of the designers. They “simply aimed too high,” the review went on, “from dresses done with 1980s-era oomph to grandiose gowns. Lesson one: If it’s too much on the runway, it’s red-carpet suicide.” (The Times has never reviewed Marchesa.)
Some fashion insiders say Marchesa’s designers are paying a price for the Weinstein connection. “This industry can be very cruel,” said Nina Garcia, the fashion director of Elle. “Maybe it’s jealousy.” On hearing the barbs, she said, “I sometimes feel like I’m in high school again, playing a scene right out of ‘Mean Girls.’ ”
If the designers themselves are stung, it does not show. “There is a backlash,” Ms. Chapman acknowledged, unflappable. “But whatever people say about Harvey to me, I want them to look at the dresses.”
Ms. Chapman frequently turns up in photographs on Mr. Weinstein’s arm, contributing, observers say, to Marchesa’s image problem.
“For their own credibility they need to stand on their own,” said Hal Rubenstein, the fashion editor of In Style magazine. “I think we should see more of them and less of him.”
Mr. Weinstein took issue with the idea that actresses choose Marchesa gowns for the red carpet to win his favor, or that he intervenes to influence their choices. “The people who say things like that are just jealous,” he said. “It takes away from the talent that Marchesa has exemplified.”
He said that he had lent the label a hand by introducing its designers to the powerful Hollywood publicists Nanci Ryder and Nicole Perna. “They in turn introduced them to every stylist in Los Angeles,” he said.
Ms. Chapman and Ms. Craig acknowledge that their aesthetic can be over the top. “We make the kinds of dresses that we want to wear,” said Ms. Craig, who was a textile designer for three years before teaming up with Ms. Chapman, who trained in London as a costume designer.
They named their company Marchesa after the Marchesa Luisa Casati, a belle époque aristocrat renowned for her flamboyant tastes. “These are fantasy clothes,” Ms. Chapman said of the more fanciful designs displayed in the showroom. “What we make for our clients in Hollywood is actually much more conservative.”
Their theatrical confections are sold at stores like Neiman Marcus, Harrods and Selfridges in Britain, Holt Renfrew in Canada and Joyce Boutique in Hong Kong. Edward Chapman, Ms. Chapman’s brother and the company’s chief executive, reported that the company generated a wholesale volume of $3.5 million last year. The couture collection, along with Notte, a less elaborately constructed secondary line, is expected to double its sales this year, Ms. Chapman pointed out.
Spoken with the grit of a woman who treks four flights of stairs each day to a design studio in the meatpacking district, where she works alongside a team of the sewers, cutters and patternmakers. “Kerry and George are hands-on,” Mr. Chapman said. “I don’t think they would be comfortable if they didn’t have a workroom on the premises.”
In these somewhat congested quarters, the designers assembled a fall collection with highlights that include a plum-tone velvet cocktail dress embroidered with a hip-length trompe l’oeil crystal necklace; a panther embroidered brocade cocoon coat fit for a Chinese Empress; and a black and white satin ball gown sculpted from a tuxedo shirt and tails.
Clients pay $3,000 to $10,000 for their dresses, engineered to flatter because they are built on a scaffolding of multiple bones and elasticized panels. Ms. Chapman laid out for inspection a hand-stitched crimson brocade dress with an elaborate internal construction rarely seen since the ’60s. Made from 15 yards of red and gold sari fabric, the dress was worn last year by Renée Zellweger to the London premiere of “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.”
“I’m always building corsets into my dresses,” Ms. Chapman said, pointing out that Ms. Zellweger’s dress was weighted at the hem “to give it a good swing when she walked” and stitched entirely by hand.
That obsessive attention to detail has paid off. “The dresses hold women in all the right ways,” Ms. Singer said. Their fishtail hems and cantilevered bosoms “make the body look long and appropriately sexy.”
Last year Marchesa was honored by the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which promotes and supports young talent. The fund was impressed that the designers diversified their business from the start, conceiving the Notte line with Neiman Marcus, to retail from about $500 to $1,100. “That kind of thinking early on seemed the right kind of step to build a significant business,” Ms. Singer said.
Others point out the collection is not driven by trends. “The dresses are pretty, not challenging,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “The silhouette is familiar and comforting, and most women find it likeable. That and not Harvey is the reason they sell.”
Initially few retailers knew of the Weinstein ties when they bought the line. “These dresses are entrance makers,” said Linda Fargo, the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman. They put her in mind of Hollywood’s Golden Age, she said, and of the legendary costumer Adrian. “The clothes are never boring, but at the same time they are not so eccentric that they become a fashion gaffe.”
Some of the dresses are in tune with an ’80s revival popular on the runways in the last year. “Looking at them, I envision two English girls sitting in freezing cold London flat doing what they imagine is America in the era of ‘Dynasty,’ ” said Barbara Tfank, a Los Angeles designer and former celebrity stylist.
Ms. Chapman makes no apology for her more exuberant designs. She works from the gut, she said, her ideas springing up spontaneously. “Sometimes I will get a call from George,” Ms. Craig said fondly. “ ‘I’m in a cab,’ she’ll say, ‘and I’ve had a vision.’ ”
Ms. Chapman’s latest brainstorm called for “a ton of white tulle and feathers,” Ms. Craig recalled. They found their way onto an ombre’d black-and-white white feathered ball gown that seems well suited to carnival in Venice.
Will anyone wear it? Probably not.
“I wouldn’t put that dress on someone for the Oscars,” Ms. Chapman said with a robust laugh. “We would probably be killed.”
[SIZE=-1]Ms. Chapman with Harvey Weinstein, whom she is dating.
[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]Georgina Chapman, Sienna Miller and Keren Craig at Marchesa's second anniversary celebration at Bergdorf Goodman.
[/SIZE]THE ATTRACTIONS From left, Sienna Miller, Anne Hathaway, Renée Zellweger, and Felicity Huffman, have worn Marchesa gowns to events.
