NEW YORK — Maybe it has something to do with being the youngest in a family of 15, but Té-Thé Nguyen is not about to get lost in the Fashion Week stampede with his Nguyen label.
Testimony to that is Wednesday night’s cocktail party and preview of his first signature ready-to-wear collection at APT. Having worked in the fashion business for 10 years for firms such as Yves Saint Laurent and Carolina Herrera, Nguyen knows the importance of distinguishing oneself. The idea is to connect with some key people so they are more inspired to attend his Sept. 15 show at the Puck Building.
“I want people to have a better idea of who I am and to give them this [preview] of my collection,” he said during an interview Monday in his sixth-floor walk-up and showroom. “The importance is in understanding me as a designer. That’s how passionate I am about it. I come from a place of creativity. I’m in it for the love of design as opposed to making money. That has always been the case.”
While studying at Parsons School of Design in Paris, Nguyen went to a lecture given by Christophe Girard, who was then at Yves Saint Laurent, and approached him afterward about an internship. A few weeks later, he was pitching in there, “being able to see the master at work” and exploring the designer’s temperature-controlled archives. “It was the greatest experience,” he said.
After graduating from Parsons, he worked in design for Carolina Herrera, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and others, but the American scene was not as enchanting.
“I’ve learned that New York is a big corporate machine,” he said. “I found myself designing everything but what I wanted to. I began to wonder if I would ever be able to do my own thing.”
Now Nguyen is, thanks to his brother, Trung, and sister-in-law, Tien, his sole financial backers. They serve as chief financial officer and chief operating officer, respectively, and each has a full-time technology job elsewhere. After the fall of Saigon, the Vietnamese-born Nguyen and his family relocated to the U.S. He said he started sketching in notebooks at the age of 11 and has continued to do so.
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“I always start with sketching,” he said. “Inspiration to me is always the same — line, shape, form, fabric and color. I am always wanting to see designs on paper and then I start draping.”
His first collection, a 20-piece arrangement, consists of intricately draped cocktail dresses, evening gowns and tailored suits, with wholesale prices expected to range from from $150 for a top to $1,600 for an evening dress. A strapless iridescent taffeta dress with twisted pleats required 10 days of draping, and a hand-painted silk charmeuse gown called for five yards of fabric. The dresses are modeled after the lines, shapes and colors of flowers. The designer handled all of the pattern-making and draping himself, since the candidates he met for those tasks here fell short.
“As a young designer, I feel there are a lot of rock stars in fashion and that’s great. I’m not dissing them. I’ve actually worked for some of them,” Nguyen said. “I want to bring the refinement of couture to the American market. Every season in New York it seems it’s more about marketability than creativity. I want to be creative while still being marketable. But I don’t want retailers to dictate what I design.”