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Miller Time Nicole Miller has been a fashion deity for two decades, thanks to her flattering silhouettes and timeless prints By Suzanne Gerber
It would be easier to sneak onto Air Force One than to snag forty-five uninterrupted minutes of Nicole Miller’s time. Her Seventh Avenue showroom office is a beehive of activity day and, one suspects, well into the evening. Her spring collection hangs in the showroom, dazzling and teasing the eye with its warm, vibrant Mayan colors and patterns. Designers, assistants, buyers, models and guests buzz back and forth, samples slung over their arms, notebooks bobbing, pencil-clutching hands waving in the air.
Twenty-two years after she opened her first studio, Nicole Miller has become a bona fide staple of American fashion. She’s haute, she’s wearable, she’s elegant and she’s everyday. And with her ceaseless expansion, first into accessories, more recently into furniture and this year into lingerie, she’s more a brand than a mere couture or ready-to-wear line. She’s as big a hit in Fairfield County as she is on the West Coast, largely because her playful yet sophisticated designs flatter almost every body type. To be an American woman and to become a fixture in the fashion world requires a personality equal to your talent. Fortunately for Nicole, she’s got both — in spades.
Q. How do you see yourself in the world of fashion?
A: I’m a designer who’s really a designer. I’m very artistic and very technical. I have a complete background in everything from draping to tailoring. [And then, as if to prove her point, she turns to a designer who’s just sashayed in with a model in an adorably skimpy outfit, rearranges some pins on the girl and says, without looking up — or breaking her concentration.] Sorry, we’re doing ten things at a time here. We do sheer fabric for the runway then have to come up with something for real life, something that covers a bit more.
Q. How involved do you get in the actual production of the collections?
A: I’m always sketching, I work with my own colors. We do all our prints in-house. We do original drawings inspired by original art and architecture, from ceramics and old documents or artifacts. I got into the ancient-culture things about four years ago. I started working with Celtic images, and it was a natural progression to Nordic, then Byzantine and now Mayan.
Too many people are interested in recent vintage, like the ’60s and ’70s, so for my collections I had to do something different. When I do trunk shows, people respond really well to the prints. I started doing tuck dresses in the ’90s, and they’ve been so popular that I haven’t stopped. Dolce & Gabbana does them, too, but they’re still kind of under the radar. They look weird on a hanger. You pick it up and don’t know what to do with it. My first one in the ’90s was asymmetrical — it definitely flew under the radar. But we’re still making them and selling more than 100,000 a year! People don’t always get it, but once they try it on, women find it very flattering and forgiving.
Q. What body types work best in your clothes?
A: Actually, all women feel thinner in my clothes because they’re so flattering. I never use heavy fabrics. I like fabrics like Lycra that don’t bulk you up.
Q. Did you grow up around fashion?
A: Yes and no. I grew up in Lenox, Massachusetts, but my mother was French, from Paris. We always had French fashion magazines in the house. Lenox was [and is] the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and there were a lot of sophisticated New Yorkers. But when I was growing up, Lenox was a fashion vacuum. For clothes, my mother would take me to New York — B. Altman, Bonwit Teller. We’d come down and look at the Christmas windows and we’d shop: It was the highlight of my year!
Q.You must have loved to sew as a young girl.
A: My mother had a sewing machine, and I taught myself to sew on it. I made a lot of different things. Around age 13 I started buying patterns at JJ Newberry and Woolworth’s and bringing them home and altering them. I still remember the dress I wore to a big dance. It was a red bandana print — I ordered the fabric from a magazine — and made a dashiki-style minidress.
Q. Do you remember other early dresses of yours?
A: There was this black-and-white paper dress that I got from a magazine — I loved that dress!
Q. Did you study art at school?
A: In my day, you didn’t have a lot of art or design classes or private tutors. That was indulgent New York living.
Q. How did you fit in with your classmates?
A: I didn’t. There were eighty of us. I guess I was the class mod, since everyone else was wearing Shetland skirts, knee socks and heather tweeds. There was always one kindred spirit who was on my wavelength, but, ultimately, I felt like I belonged somewhere else, like New York or Paris.
Q. When did you first visit Europe?
A: I was an art student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and I managed to rig up my own exchange program. I got credits at RISD and the Chambre [the highly prestigious Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris] at the same time and took degrees from both.
Q. Did you dream of having your own design house back then?
A: Like everyone else in design school, I imagined having my own business. I started mine with $115,000 — $15,000 was mine and Bud [Bud Konheim, her business partner to this day] had $100,000. We weren’t a romantic couple — there are no couples in business together. They’d kill each other! Well, except for Catherine Malandrino and Jill Stuart. They and their husbands make it work somehow.
Q. What do you remember about those early days?
A: We opened our doors in 1982. It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that my success is owed to one particular frock dress that summer. It sold like crazy, but if anyone remembers that, they probably have gray hair. But that did launch our business, and if you get one item like that, you can keep going. So we persevered, and in 1990, I did my first trunk show. Nowadays, new designers do them right out of the gate, but it took me eight years to build up the confidence.
Q. Your collections are always so fresh and innovative. Where do you get your inspiration from?
A: Everything inspires me! For the past several years I wanted to do a collection around Celtic knots and finally I said I’m doing it. It did well and seemed so fresh and different from what everyone else was doing. Then we did Nordic and from there I went into Byzantine. And now for this spring, I got very excited by Mayan designs that I saw in Tulum last March. I got such strong inspiration while there, and I don’t do anything unless I’m strongly inspired. But I still love the Byzantine, and you’ll always see Celtic notes in my accessories, particularly the sunglasses.
Q. How do you translate Byzantine artifacts into contemporary clothing?
A: I was fascinated by the Byzantine documents we found in American books, in libraries and in Turkey when we visited. One way we interpreted the visual look of faded bits of writing was to create sepia-toned fabrics that felt like faded documents. And we took patterns from ceramica, reconceived them and created prints. The blue border you see on some of the clothes comes directly from the ceramics.
Q. You have a lot of celebrity fans.
A: And we love them. After Angelina Jolie showed up in one of my dresses at Show West with Brad Pitt last year, I could have sold 10,000. But we only made 600. We never want to flood the market. We’re told that some of the people who’ve come into our stores [there are 30 free-standing Nicole Miller boutiques around the country] include Anne Hathaway, Felicity Huffman, Sheryl Crow. And Joss Stone apparently is a huge fan, which is flattering.
Q. Do you travel much?
A: I have a ten-year-old son in private school in New York, so we travel around his schedule. I do love to travel, but I haven’t been to Paris in four years or Milan in eight. I don’t even go to the couture shows. I did love Tulum and Morocco, and Dubai and Sharjah, another emirate, are incredible. You drive through there, there’s no alcohol, you hear everyone praying. Talk about inspiration.
Q.You’ve created a furniture line?
A: Yes. It debuted in September 2005 at High Point [the important biannual North Carolina furniture show]. It’s been in development for two years — it’s a long process to get the designs right, the fabrics right, to get everything tooled.
Q. And lingerie is another new direction for you?
A: It’s very high-end: all Italian fabrics that I personally choose from swatches. The line debuted this past January and is available only through barenecessities.com. Lucky for me, I’m a designer size so I get to test all the designs myself.
And with that, Nicole lets loose a sly, kittenish smile. Another designer bounds in and hands her boss a sheet of swatches to create one of the pieces in the new collection. Nicole rubs the fabric between discerning fingers and says thoughtfully, “No, this is too heavy. This one is a little cheesy-looking. Where’s that beautiful one we loved?”
She searches till her grimace turns up at the edges. “This one,” she says, and the designer scurries off, her muse’s vision clearly within reach. |
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