Designer Puts Family Ahead of Business

Designing bridal gowns can leave one with very firm opinions on marriage and family.

Just ask New York designer Carolina Herrera, who created Caroline Kennedy’s much-copied wedding gown and has been manufacturing a bridal collection for 2 1/2 years.

Herrera believes a woman can have it all--career and family. But if she’s smart, she’ll have her family first.

Family is ‘the most important thing in life. For a woman, even one who wants to be in business, first you have to try and have a family and children. . . . That’s the role of women in the world.”

Bush-era family values have trickled up to Herrera’s bridal customers, who are typically 23 to 25 and well to do. Herrera’s bridal collection, which can be identified immediately by simple round necklines, short sleeves (“like a T-shirt”) and full ballet-dancer skirts, retails between $2,500 and $7,500 at Bullocks Wilshire.

‘I have heard lots of young girls who are getting married saying, ‘Let me take care of my house and husband first.’ It’s not, ‘I’ll take one week off, go back to work and in 10 years I’ll think if I want to have a baby.’ I don’t see that anymore. I think they’re doing it in a different way now.”

Herrera, a Venezuelan socialite who grew up wearing made-to-order clothes, started her business in 1981. Since then, she has put her imprimatur on perfume, women’s ready-to-wear, and, starting this season, sportswear.

But she maintains that “if I had to leave my business for my family I’d do it in five seconds--in two seconds. My family comes first.”

Although she hasn’t had to test that principle, she did have to put another of her tenets to work when one of her daughters, Anna Luisa, 25, was married last fall in New York. The designer made sure she didn’t interfere with Anna Luisa’s vision of how she would look on her wedding day, even though she, Herrera, would be making the dress. Anna Luisa “had very definite ideas,” Herrera said. “She wanted a big skirt with a big tulle train and she didn’t want to have very big shoulders and she wanted ribbons in her hair,” instead of flowers.

“I think for a mother, it’s very important to let the daughter decide what she wants to wear because it’s the most important day of her life,” Herrera said.

“I always like it when the girls come in by themselves,” she added, referring to her made-to-order clientele. Usually, they bring their mothers in for the initial meeting, and the second time they come alone. “That’s easier,” Herrera admitted.