NEW YORK — The Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan is a few steps too far from the Garment District for most designers, but it suits William Calvert just fine.
There, the bespectacled designer is working full-time again on his couture business in his four-story town house on West 43rd Street. After a gig designing Perry Ellis coats ended last year, Calvert reassessed and decided to devote all of his time to his couture business, which he started in 1997.
“The plan is to build a couture house the old way — customer by customer,” he said. “Eventually I will go back to stores, but I want to have a strong client base first.”
Calvert’s architectural-inspired eveningwear, ready-to-wear and wedding gowns are something to marvel at, as is the 4,000-square-foot spread he shares with his wife, Halla Elias, the children’s wear designer behind the Halabaloo label, and their son, Oden. By having a sample room, showroom and work studio on the premises, Calvert can cater to a customer’s every whim and often develops ideas after chatting with clients about what they and he had in mind, while his son dashes in and out.
“I know it’s great to say, ‘Wow, I’m a designer, I can do that,'” he said. “But what’s really great is to hear someone say, ‘I feel so beautiful in this dress.'”
Calvert designs customized pieces for 50 women, most of whom hear about him via word-of-mouth or see his creations on other people at black-tie events. A graduate of the Academia Italiana Moda in Florence and mentored by the late Geoffrey Beene, he is known for his exacting designs, spending 8 to 10 weeks to complete most dresses. But when one of his better customers needed a wedding gown, the designer delivered in three weeks, even though the dress was made of 52 meters of fabrics.
While Calvert has had a couture business throughout his career, he also sold his collection to stores such as Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys New York from 1997 through 2001.
Calvert is considering staging his first formal presentation in February.
A few of his personal favorites are an ivory high-twist silk crepe gown with a green satin-faced silk organza bow, and a black herringbone silk strapless dress with a flat tab reminiscent of a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed cantilever roof. Concentric ribbons on a bustier and a sleeveless kimono top with a long seersucker silk skirt are other well-defined pieces. His dresses wholesale for $600 to $7,500. Even the Pucci mannequins have their own signatures — one was modeled after Veruschka, another designed by Ruben Toledo and a third by children’s book illustrator Chelsey McLaren.
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“A lot of the people who come in to see me have been to all the name brand stores. They will say, ‘I love what I see, but I know even if I spend $15,000, I will see someone else wearing the same thing. I want something that says ‘me,'” Calvert said. “I wanted this to be about the customer — the research, the fitting, the flattery, and not about the front row. That’s great, but it’s about the clothes at the end of the day.”