Vera Wang: Wedding Dress Designer?

In my previous post on Chelsea Clinton's wedding dress and Vera Wang, the designer Chelsea chose to make her dress, my link to a much earlier blog post I wrote on Wang's wedding dress designs was incorrect.

I am reproducing that blog article, "Modern Bridal Wear - Vera Wang's Mounds of Chiffon" below, including a picture of the "mounds of chiffon."

Modern Bridal Wear - Vera Wang's Mounds of Chiffon
(Above link from January 27, 2010 Camera Lucida blog entry)

[Photo from Vera Wang's Spring 2010 Bridal Collection]

Beauty is the last thing on the minds of modern designers. Edginess, the avant-garde, experimentation and originality win over aesthetics.

Such is the case with bridal fashion. Vera Wang, the big name in bridal design, studied art history, and was fashion editor for sixteen years before she apprenticed with Ralph Lauren for a couple of years. She opened her store several years after that. The bulk of her experience is more in critiquing and analyzing gowns and dresses rather than making them herself.

Since beauty is no longer important, many design schools bypass craftsmanship for experimentation and originality. This suits designers like Wang just fine, who decided to enter the design field much later in life, and with minimal training. She doesn’t have to produce gowns which are carefully constructed and sewn. Instead, she can improvise with the gauzy materials and ephemeral colors. Modern brides, themselves with lax standards for craftsmanship but with high expectations for originality, are happy to pay thousands of dollars for her mounds of chiffon.