Vera's coming" says the receptionist, sitting up straighter at her glossy black lacquer desk. "Vera's coming," echoes a publicist, showing the way to a stark white conference room. Suddenly the subject of attention--designer Vera Wang--walks through the door. She flings off her tiny gray fur shrug and folds her pixielike frame into a chair. She's wearing her self-described uniform of black leggings, black leather wedges, and a black T-shirt layered with a taupe ribbed long-sleeved Rick Owens tee. Over her jet-black, nearly waist-length hair, she's tugged a knit cashmere hat. The whole effect is very much that of a pretty 16-year-old Goth rather than the 61-year-old head of a company that's about to hit the $1-billion-a-year mark.
"I just grabbed whatever," Wang says of her ensemble, with all the nonchalance of a college student who's picked up some clothes off the floor. But it's not quite as unplanned as all that. "I study being unstudied." Wang selected the Rick Owens tee off the shelf in her duplex at 740 Park Avenue that she shares with her husband, Arthur Becker, where she has an entire room dedicated solely to her T-shirt collection. The tops are all carefully organized by designer and are almost exclusively in what Wang terms "Armani colors: You know, gray, black, navy." "Do you have thousands?" She nods, then shakes her head, laughing. "I couldn't even count the amount."
"Vera is a black-belt shopper," says her old friend Michael Kors. In fact, it's how Kors met Wang back in the early '80s, when he was the precocious, baby-faced designer for Lothar's on 57th Street. "She was this fashion whirlwind," says Kors, who was thrilled that the then--fashion editor was going nuts in his boutique. "She pulled half a rack of clothes, and then she went to pay, but she realized she didn't have her wallet. 'I'll have someone bring over a check,' she said. And our staff was like, 'She's probably not coming back.' But that check got dropped by."
Everyone has a Vera moment, it seems--even legendary fashion editor Polly Allen Mellen, who was Wang's first boss, her mentor, and a dear friend. "I will never forget, it was so incredible," says Mellen of the ?rst day Wang showed up for work at Vogue. "She was dressed in a white crepe de chine Yves Saint Laurent dress, with long red ?ngernails and very beautiful, very high-heeled pumps. And I said to her, 'Vera, we are going to be working in the fashion closet and, believe me, we'll be on our hands and knees. So I think you should go home and change.'
"She was inspiring, her energy, her caring, never complaining, which was really how she was brought up," continues Mellen. "She was a pleasure, and she skyrocketed." Wang remembers one particular shoot with Mellen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when it was pouring rain: "I made a mistake. I left a hat back at the of?ce, and Polly said to go back," Wang remembers. "But I didn't have my wallet and had no way to get a cab. Right behind me was a shoot van with Patrick Demarchelier, and I had to borrow money from him. I never forget that whenever I go to the Met."
Her spontaneity and eccentricity charm everyone. Kors is still laughing over a night in the '80s when they headed downtown to see Dolly Parton perform. "I went over to her apartment, and she had this fur coat from Fendi that she wanted to show me and these earrings from Paloma Picasso that were basically gold Ping-Pong balls. She was like, I'm just going to wear the coat, which she threw on over a leotard," Kors recalls. "It was not the usual out?t for 14th Street in the '80s. When we got out of the car, everyone started yelling, 'Yoko!' And Vera said, 'I don't understand why they think I'm Yoko Ono. I'm Chinese, not Japanese.'"
In an industry often mocked for its population of self-serious introverts, Wang is the opposite. Her drink of choice is vodka, and she's usually the first one on the dance floor. She's even got a luxe version of a party van that's her rolling home base between events. "Vera is like a windup toy. Her energy is actually extraordinary," says interior designer Lisa Jackson, her best friend of 20 years. Even when Wang is at home, the festivities come to her. "Her house is the clubhouse, that's for sure," Jackson says. Many Sunday nights, everyone from Barbara Walters to Mayor Michael Bloomberg can be found at her expansive residence, enjoying impromptu Chinese suppers whipped up by her chef of 30 years.
Wang's sense of humor is well-known. "I poke fun at myself and the industry. If I didn't laugh, I don't think I'd be here today." She surely wouldn't have survived one sartorially disastrous trip to the White House. She had been invited for a luncheon with then-First lady Hillary Clinton. "We were halfway through the metal detectors when I looked down and realized Vera was wearing one brown shoe and one navy shoe," Kors remembers. "In my hysteria to get there, I grabbed the same shoe in two different colors," Wang says. "It was my first time at the White House. I was mortified. And I remember Oscar de la Renta and Michael were laughing at me." She shrugs. "What was I going to do?" Her latest visit, for a state dinner in January, went more smoothly.
She is no stranger to impressive surroundings. She grew up the privileged daughter of a Chinese-born business tycoon and an elegant, worldly mother who regularly shopped the couture shows in Paris. "My mother was extremely controlled, sort of flawless. And I always tend to be a bit more hippie," she says. "She was a Tiger Mother. ... But she really tried to encourage me to be who I was." Wang tries to be more hands-off with her own daughters, Josephine, 17, and Cecilia, 20. "I don't live through my kids. But I do know what will happen in life, and I just want them well prepared." Neither shows signs of wanting to follow in their mother's footsteps, which is fine with her. "I'm sure they remember me as always exhausted."
Wang has been rising at dawn and working around the clock since age eight, when she famously took up figure skating. While at college at Sarah Lawrence, her parents thought she would be a champion skater. "I was trying to manage school and training for the Olympics and ended up not doing well at either. That was a big lesson in my life," she sighs. "My mother expected both."
Instead, she was drawn to a world she had glimpsed through famed '60s model and college friend Penelope Tree, who would hitch rides back to campus in Wang's Porsche. "Let me tell you, when we came back from our first Christmas vacation and Penelope said, 'I was with David Bailey in London,' and I was ice-skating at a rink in New Jersey, I kind of got the difference between what my life was and what her life was." Wang practically cackles. "She wasn't going to Harvard-Yale football games and shit like that."
After graduating, Wang dedicated herself entirely to working her way up the fashion food chain. "It's a calling. Like being a musician. I mean, the hours of practice, the loneliness, the dedication. It was a very obsessive job for me," she explains. "My father didn't get it," she continues, remembering a time she had to turn down dinner with him even though he had flown into Paris just to see her while she was shooting with Arthur Elgort. "I'm in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, and I had a military jacket on with pins, tape, and clamps. I looked like a terrorist or something, and my father said, 'Can't you just comb your hair and put a dress on and come to dinner with me?' I said no. And he said, 'I don't know why you want to do this,' and I said, 'I do.'"
In fact, it was her own wedding that launched her bridal brand. In 1989, Wang was working as a design director at Ralph Lauren. Frustrated with racks of the requisite meringues and sugary confections at shops everywhere, she wanted a modern antidote. So she hired a dressmaker to achieve her own design--a simple gown of white sequins. The next year, with funding from her father, she launched her eponymous label to fill the niche for brides seeking similarly chic looks. "I saw it as a foundation for a business I could make a difference in and as something that could lead to other businesses," she says.
Her predictions have proved correct: Along with the successful ready-to-wear line she began in 2000, she just launched a line with David's Bridal, making Vera gowns available to brides of all income levels and sizes. (One can also get Vera Wang clothing, china, shoes, mattresses, luggage, and fragrance.) Cash registers everywhere are ka-ching-ing from women who want to buy a piece of her good taste. "I've always admired Vera's strong sense of personal style, which is inspired by her own life as a busy, beautiful, modern woman," Ralph Lauren says.
Wang never got a "vote of approval or a 'hurrah for you' or any of that" from her beloved father, who died in 2006 on the morning of her Spring 2007 show. It might be why she never allows herself to rest on her laurels. "If I were to say at any point that I feel really con?dent or really in control, that would be a mistake. Because I don't," she says. "I always see where I didn't do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That's a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that. ... I think what it really is, is that I have an artistic soul. And I didn't know how to live without indulging that."
