“One always measures friendships by how they show up in bad weather,” said Glenda Bailey, the editor in chief of Heart Corp. magazine Harper’s Bazaar at a lunch on Thursday afternoon for the designer, and scion, designer Gabriela Hearst.
Jennifer Fisher, Athena Calderone, Miroslava Duma and Danielle and Laura Kosann were on the fourth floor of Barneys New York — tucked away in a side room, far from Upper East Side shoppers and the impeding rainstorm — to mark the arrival of Hearst’s first fall collection at the department store, no matter that she had her spring presentation looming the following morning.
“I love Gabriela’s clothes because she managed to infuse a masculine sensibility into very feminine clothes,” said Barneys’ Simon Doonan. “Like Marlene Dietrich in a men’s tuxedo, it’s ultimately more feminine.”
Hearst’s designs are done in the highest-quality fabrics — think Italian and English cashmeres, merinos, wax canvas and leathers, rendered into sharply tailored classics. And her attention to detail was honed while working on her first line, Candela, which she launched in 2004.
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While that was geared toward a younger clientele, her namesake label is decidedly for a more distinguished, and wiser, woman.
“I started Candela in my early 20s and now I’m nearly 40,” she said.
In a fitting analogy, Hearst gave birth to her third child shortly after unveiling the line in the spring. “A new collection and a baby,” she said. “That brings me to the point that this is a collection for women, and what we can achieve. That’s the main thing, we create.”