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History of Hermes

The French high fashion house Hermes specializes in a variety of products, including ready-to-wear clothing, leather goods and accessories and perfumes.

Raymond (Ossie) Clark

British designer Raymond (Ossie) Clark (1942 – 1996) was born on 9 June 1942 in Liverpool, England. He was known by his nickname Ossie, after Oswaldtwistle, the Lancashire village to which the family was evacuated during World War II.

Roberto Capucci

Roberto Capucci was born in Rome on 2 December 1930. He attended the Liceo artis-tico and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, undecided as to whether to become an architect or a film director. He began designing clothing when he was still quite young and soon turned to fashion as his primary activity.

Stephen Burrows

Stephen Gerald Burrows was born on 15 September 1943 in Newark, New Jersey. He studied at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art from 1961 to 1963 and at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York from 1964 to 1966.

Pierre Cardin

During the last half of the twentieth century, Pierre Cardin became a prominent and widely admired designer as well as a highly successful businessman. Cardin is known for his acute intuition, which often made him a trendsetter and design leader.

Pierre Balmain

Pierre Balmain was born in the Savoie region of France in 1914. He studied architecture for a year in Paris before taking a position as a sketch artist with the fashion house of Robert Piguet in 1934. He worked at the House of Molyneux as an assistant designer.

Jeanne Paquin

Jeanne Paquin (1869–1936) was the first woman to gain international celebrity in the fashion business. Her design career spanned the three decades from 1891 to 1920. She was born Jeanne Marie Charlotte Beckers in l’Ile Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris.

Geoffrey Beene

Geoffrey Beene was born Samuel Albert Bozeman Jr. in Haynesville, Louisiana, on 30 August 1927, into a family of doctors. He dutifully enrolled in the premed program at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1943.

Burberry

Although overtly recognized by its trademark check of red, black, white, and camel, Burberry is principally renowned for its innovation in waterproof clothing, rather than for the design of the lining material that traditionally lies beneath the outer gabardine cloth.

Bonnie Cashin

One of America’s foremost designers in the second half of the twentieth century, Bonnie Cashin (1908 – 2000) was a pioneer in the sportswear industry, specializing in modular wardrobes for the modern woman “on the go.”

Azzedine Alaïa

Azzedine Alaïa was born in southern Tunisia in about 1940 to a farming family descended from Spanish Arabic stock. He was brought up by his maternal grandparents in Tunis and, at the age of fifteen, enrolled at l’École des beaux-arts de Tunis to study sculpture.

André Courrèges

André Courrèges was born in Pau, in the Basque part of France. He studied engineering before pursuing a career in fashion. Courrèges worked first under the illustrious couturier Cristobal Balenciaga from 1950 until 1961, when he left to open his own house.

Louis Vuitton

The French firm of Louis Vuitton, making prestigious luggage and leather accessories since the middle of the 19th century, has been much overshadowed by its merger with Moët-Hennessey to become Moët-Hennessey Louis Vuitton (LVMH).

Comme des garçons

Rei Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1942, the daughter of a senior academic at Keio University. She studied fine art (both Japanese and Western) at Keio and, after graduating in 1964, joined the advertising department of the Japanese chemical company Asahi Kasei, which produced acrylic fabrics.

Giorgio Armani

Giorgio Armani, one of the most authoritative names in Italian ready-to-wear design, was born in Piacenza, Italy, in 1934. He became interested in fashion in 1957, when he left the school of medicine at the University of Piacenza to become a buyer for the La Rinascete chain in Milan.

Cristobal Balenciaga

Born in 1895 in Guetaria (Getaria), a small fishing village on the tempestuous northern coast of Spain, Cristobal Balenciaga Eisaguirre (1895 – 1972) was to become, in his own lifetime, the most famous Spanish fashion designer of his generation.

Hussein Chalayan

Hussein Chalayan’s fascination with architecture, spatial dynamics, urban identity, and aerodynamics is expressed in garments based on concepts, technological systems, historical dress, and theories of the body. His clothes are minimal in look but maximal in thought.

Manolo Blahnik

Manolo Blahnik (b. 1942) was a designer and manufacturer of what were called “the sexiest shoes in the world”—beautiful, expensive, and highly coveted by many of the world’s most fashionable women.

Fashion Designers

A fashion designer is responsible for creating the specific look of individual garments— including a garment’s shape, color, fabric, trimmings, and other aspects of the whole. The fashion designer begins with an idea of how a garment should look, turns that idea into a design (such as a sketch), and specifies how that design should be made into an actual piece of clothing by other workers (from patternmakers to finishers).

Alexander McQueen

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN (1969 - 2010) burst onto the fashion stage in 1992, courting controversy as headlines hailed him as the new enfant terrible.

Christian Dior

The most influential fashion designer of the late 1940s and 1950s, CHRISTIAN DIOR dominated fashion after World war II with the hourglass silhouette of his voluptuous New Look.

Jeanne Lanvin

Jeanne Lanvin was a woman of few words. In the world of rustling silks and gossip into which she was drawn as she went from client to client, this is a disconcerting characteristic.

Gabrielle Chanel

Like a tale from The Arabian Nights, Chanel's life story is one of magical transformations. She had five distinct lives (five being without a doubt her lucky number), and while each one does not spring directly from the one before, they were nevertheless connected by one continuous thread which stretched from the beginning of this century to the end style.