Narciso Rodriguez Is Returning to Fashion
The designer behind Carolyn Bessette Kennedy's wedding dress is returning to ready-to-wear. “I want to start making clothes again,” he tells T&C exclusively.
BY BRIDGET FOLEY
PUBLISHED: FEB 21, 2024 9:50 AM EST
Last summer Narciso Rodriguez moved into a new design studio on 11th Avenue in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, a proverbial stone’s throw from the Hudson River.
“I feel like I’m at the beginning of my career again,” he says. A fresh beginning, more than 30 years in. The reboot finds Rodriguez plotting his return to fashion, starting with geography. The current office is closer to his home than his previous headquarters, allowing for a quicker commute and more time with his six-year-old twins. And even if he’s still clarifying all that a new ready-to-wear venture details, one thing is certain: It must “make sense for my life.”
For more than two decades Rodriguez, 63, was a master of sensual minimalism, creating alluring, sophisticated clothes for legions of women who view clean-lined, feminine dressing as both a source and expression of power. Then Covid “ended the business.” When that happened, Rodriguez left the company quietly, shuttering the office on Irving Place without fanfare—yet with plenty of emotion, for the past and, mostly, for the people “who had been there from the beginning,” he says. “That was the hardest part, saying goodbye.” Yet creative fire is not easily extinguished.
“The craft, I realized, is so embedded in me,” Rodriguez says over a downtown lunch. “I can’t stop working. I'm too young. I want to start making clothes again.” This time around, he tells me, work will follow his needs rather than making him spin furiously to satiate the industry’s relentless demand for more seasons and more shows. For starters, he’s done with runway, which he finds out-of-touch and impersonal. In fact, he has been doing special, one-off pieces for key clients all along; his thought now is to expand that model, but deftly.
“I need [the business] to be streamlined,” he says. “Whether it’s five dresses that I make for my own pleasure, or I produce them, that’s yet to be seen.” He’s open to a like-minded financial partner or license, but he may do it on his own—an option possible thanks to his thriving fragrance business with Shiseido. For Her, his instant smash first scent, is hotter than ever after turning 20 last year. And his newest offering, All of Me, which debuted last fall, looks headed for similar success.
Already Rodriguez has the infrastructure in place to create custom and limited-run pieces. He’s even working again with some of the trusted former employees he had to let go. (One has opened a pattern studio, while several others were hired by production workrooms in what’s left of the city’s once iconic Garment Center.)
Creatively, the timing couldn’t be better, as zeal for all things ’90s has exploded. Though he didn’t launch his business until 1997, Rodriguez is seen as having been at the forefront of the decade’s minimalism, his spare aesthetic something of a refined, glamorous counterpoint to Helmut Lang’s bold, aggressive streetwear. While the clothes appear simple, each element is highly considered: the hand of every fabric, the line of every shoulder, the placement of every seam. Often the clothes work an architectural undercurrent, an interest that dates from his childhood as the son of Cuban immigrants.
Rodriguez trained painstakingly. He started with weekend classes at Parsons School of Design (now part of the New School) while in high school. After undergrad, also at Parsons, he worked for two giants of American fashion: Anne Klein (first under design partners Donna Karan and Louis Dell'Olio, and later just Dell'Olio, after Karan left to start her own company) and Calvin Klein . He ultimately departed the latter for simultaneous gigs, on staff as creative director at Tse Cashmere and consulting at Cerruti in Paris. Through it all, Rodriguez remained mostly unknown beyond the insider New York fashion sphere.
Then: the Dress, and overnight global superstardom. At Calvin, Rodriguez became close with a beautiful young public relations hire, Carolyn Bessette. They stayed best friends after he left the company and even lived in the same East Village apartment building. One evening she took him out to Odeon, and over martinis she made a big reveal: She was engaged to John F. Kennedy Jr., and she wanted Rodriguez to make her wedding dress.
He designed two: one with a sharp, architectural neckline and skinny straps, and the one she chose, a soft, completely unfettered white silk slip. While working on the latter dress in Paris, and without naming the bride, Rodriguez showed it to Azzedine Alaïa, with whom he had become friendly. Alaïa offered a piece of advice: “Move the seams over her butt a half an inch.”
The famous picture of the newlyweds, with the groom kissing the bride’s gloved hand, went around the pre–social media world almost instantly, and LVMH took note. Then Rodriguez was working for the company’s recently acquired Spanish house, Loewe, while also launching his own brand.
The times were hectic, as Rodriguez traveled frequently between New York and Spain, with stopovers in Paris and Italy. He stayed for four years at Loewe, where he says he “made a tooth” in refreshing the house’s identity, and forged friendships that remain strong today.
Meanwhile, chic-minded women, including many of the celebrity sort, embraced his work on both continents. He has famously dressed, among others, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rachel Weisz, Claire Danes, Julianna Margulies, and Michelle Obama. Typically, his illustrious clients have become friends and muses. “They’re strong. They’re confidant. They’re self-possessed,” he says. “Certainly, Carolyn is always present over my shoulder.”
Yet these women have nothing on the twins, Ivy and Callum, whom he shares with his ex-partner. For the next several years at least, Rodriguez’s workday ends at 2:45 p.m.—hard stop. This dad won’t miss school pickup to fit a dress. He’s grateful for the work-obsessed decades of yore, when creating beautiful fashion meant everything. He’s grateful, too, that he now sees work in a different light.
“I got to do my work and love my work,” Rodriguez says. “And then these two beings appeared and showed me that there is so much more. Now I get to focus on and spend time with them. It has given me a great balance.”
