Her Golden State
If not for the confiscation of her childhood Barbie doll, Amy Michelson might never have become a fashion designer.
She loved that ratty old doll with bad hair that a neighbor girl had given her and was thrilled thinking of the clothes she would make for it. But Michelson was forbidden to own or associate with the busty, wasp-waisted toy by her feminist mother, Nancy, and when the verboten hunk of plastic was discovered, its days were numbered.
“I sat behind the dresser in my little room and I cried,” she recalls. “I wrote on the wall: ‘Mommy is a pig, mommy is a cow.’ ”
Michelson laughs about it now. “She’s mellowed out, my mother.”
But she stops for a minute and thinks. “When I look at some of the gowns I’ve made, they’re very Barbie. In a funny way, I think, well, maybe my mother did me a favor.”
The Los Angeles-based Michelson has channeled whatever frustrated creativity she had with Barbie into a collection of feminine, romantic, fluid dresses. The Amy Michelson for Holly Harp collection (priced at $1,200 to $3,500) finds its signature in bias-cut satin gowns; long dresses in cut velvet over contrasting satin; strapless duchess satin styles; layered chiffon minis with bands of satin on a matching jacket. Dresses even have names: Southern Comfort, Sleeping Beauty, Paloma; there’s even a fabric called Velvet Elvis. A lower-priced line, HH by Amy Michelson, sells for $600 to $1,000. There’s also a bridal line, Amy Michelson Wedding.
The celebrity roster is growing, and already includes Michelle Pfeiffer, Kim Basinger, Halle Berry, Alanis Morissette, Viveca Fox, Roseanne, Lisa Rinna and Kathy Najimy. This undoubtedly has helped Michelson garner a reputation in an extremely competitive, bottom-line obsessed business that boasts few stars outside of Europe and New York.
East Coast prejudice be damned, Michelson, in her late 30s, is happy to be known as a California designer.
“I really feel strong about that,” she says. “L.A. has such a bad reputation for just being about baggy shorts and surfboards, but there’s a lot going on. Because I’m not in New York, that’s what makes me distinct and have a different point of view. I’m very happy here.”
From Fashion to
Acting and Back
Michelson took a circuitous route to get where she is, from fashion designer to costumer-stylist to actress back to fashion designer. Arriving at this point, she already has a leg up on some of her competition.
Instead of starting the line from scratch, she inherited it from her former employer, mentor and friend, the late designer Holly Harp. The label itself--Amy Michelson for Holly Harp--is a bittersweet reminder of Harp’s legacy and creative force, and of the young woman who would become her successor.
Harp died in 1995 at the age of 55 after a brief bout with cancer. Her romantic, ethereal designs evolved from flowing flower child dresses with fringe and feathers to more sophisticated styles in draped chiffon and matte jersey. She had her own boutique on Sunset Boulevard and a substantial celebrity following that included Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Goldie Hawn, Diana Ross and Barbra Streisand, and was twice nominated for the prestigious Coty Award.
Michelson signed on as her design assistant in 1989, overseeing the sample and pattern makers, sketching and having input on designs, and acting as Harp’s fit model. It was terrific training ground for Michelson, who, for a short time, produced a line of opulent ball gowns on her own during the early ‘80s.
“They were like soul sisters,” says Jim Harp, Holly’s ex-husband and the company’s current sales director. “They had a lot of fun working together and enjoying the creative process and really being on the same wavelength.”
Adds Michelson, “We had a similar personality and sensibility. She was very respectful and generous, and really funny and creative. I learned so much from her as far as taking risks and allowing things to just unfold. If it’s not working, put it on backwards or slice it up the side. There were no rules.”
She still follows that no-rules policy today in her Culver City studio, which is tucked away on a side street populated with small warehouses. The bland exterior belies the hum of energy inside. Clothes are everywhere in various evolutionary stages: in pieces on cutting tables, being buzzed through a sewing machine, pinned to dress forms, hanging on racks waiting for fittings.
Michelson is now her own fit model, along with design assistant Lisa Sweet.
“I spend most of the day without my clothes on,” she says, laughing and tossing some blond strands from her face. “But I think that’s the beauty of being a female designer who designs for women. I am slim, but I have an hourglass figure and I have hips and a butt and I know what I feel comfortable in, and when I need coverage. I like working with myself or Lisa because we’re not static and I really feel what feels good. Something can be great as a concept or a sketch, and sometimes it doesn’t work out, or it evolves into something different. I’ll allow it to sort of direct me.”
Her office is a neatly cluttered array of sketches and photographs that dot the walls. Sample dresses hang in plastic covers, and there’s a spot under a desk for her dog Hannah, a German shorthair pointer.
She Finds Fabrics
to Be Inspirational
Michelson is in the midst of selling spring 1999, which will have a 1920s feel. When inspiration comes it’s never via trend reports or other collections. Most of the time it’s the fabrics.
“I take a lot of direction from the fabrics,” Michelson says, her fingers gliding over a burnout velvet column dress. I tear things out of magazines, I’ll write things down in the middle of the night. I have an idea file in my car, and one here. But when I go to buy fabrics I’ll kind of let everything go and let myself get inspired. I get a sense of what’s going on from the fabrics that speak to me, and somehow it all comes together from that. I’ll borrow the fabrics from the reps and spend a weekend in my hotel room in New York and spread everything out, and pick and choose and try to envision two collections. That’s really fun. That’s the beginning of the creative process.
“With the spring line, it’s that designer’s intuition. I was feeling that vintage clothes were becoming really important, and I wanted to take elements of that and do them in a modern way.”
After several collections on her own, Michelson feels as if the line now truly reflects her sensibilities.
“The whole look has become much more glamorous,” she explains. “It’s just different from Holly’s. Her sensibility was almost a little artsier, she was more a fairy tale princess. We still do chiffon dresses, but they’re not fluffy--they’re clean and modern. I’ve started cutting a lot of dresses on the bias, which has been a way to work with soft fabrics and have them look sexy and new and fresh. They just feature the fabric and the person.”
Childhood in N.J.
Was Not Glamorous
Glamour did not exactly define Michelson’s upbringing. Born in Wyckoff, N.J., she and her older sister were daughters of Quaker parents who converted “because of spiritual and political reasons” and were active in the civil rights and antiwar movements.
“It was kind of a neat foundation,” she recalls, “because when I was little we were being dragged down to Washington for peace marches, and it was definitely different than anyone else in my neighborhood. There were always interesting people coming to the house and playing guitar, and I just thought it was all pretty cool.”
She loved to scour thrift stores for vintage crinolines and says her clothes consciousness “was there. It was definitely there.”
But it wasn’t until the summer she spent working as a waitress in the Hamptons, New York’s exclusive vacation enclave, that Michelson glimpsed her future.
“I had never been exposed to all these people, most of them coming from Manhattan, from the fashion business. It was like a little lightbulb went off--something resonated in me. I met these people, and I was so taken with them because I thought they were so fabulous and they had all these great clothes and cars and their houses were beautiful. It was just kind of like a fairy tale for me because I was Quaker. I had this really strong sense that I could do what they did.”
The Barbie incident aside, Michelson describes her mother, a painter and former art teacher, as a woman who “still loves a pretty dress. And my grandmother was an artist, so they love the creativity.” Her father, Burl, is a retired labor-management negotiator, and both closely follow their daughter’s career.
After graduating from Bard College in New York, where she majored in fine art, she went to Parsons School of Design in New York. After finishing in 1980, Michelson started her own line of ball gowns. Her timing was impeccable--the Reagan era brought a new appreciation for bigger and glitzier everything, and Michelson’s opulent gowns fit right in.
Although she was a hit right out of the starting gate, after a year and a half things began to unravel. Deadlines and production demands were overwhelming, “and I just freaked out,” she recalls. “I was really young, and I didn’t know anything about business. I got out.”
She worked as a stylist and costumer but after a while burned out on New York.
Next stop: Los Angeles.
Michelson decided to pursue acting, which led to film and TV roles, including “Wired,” “Burglar” “Falcon Crest.”
“I was fully into it,” she recalls. “I still loved clothes, but I didn’t miss designing. I had done ‘Falcon Crest,’ and at that point I was working a lot, so I was on a roll for a couple of years. Then I had a not-so-good couple of years, and also I realized I had played a lot of really dramatic characters, and I had to cry at almost every audition. I didn’t want to go there anymore. The other thing was, I started not liking being an actress. I felt you had to be so self-involved in order to succeed, and you’re always defining yourself by what jobs you do or are up for. I felt like I was growing out of it.”
About that time, as fate would have it, she was introduced to Harp, who was looking for a design assistant.
When the time came to pass the baton, Michelson says she was ready, a far different person now from the young designer who couldn’t handle the tough demands of success.
“When [Holly] was sick, we’d talk about it,” Michelson says. “I said, ‘Obviously I’ll continue,’ and I kind of realized it was my destiny. I thought, ‘I’m supposed to be doing this, and I’m older now and I’ve learned a lot.’ ”
Michelson admits, however, that at the debut of her first collection in the company’s New York showroom in 1995, “I had never been so scared in my life. I just felt like this was such a huge responsibility, and if I fail, I’ll bring down the whole ship. But I also knew that what scares you the most is what’s going to get you the furthest. And the collection was well received.”
It’s not often that a designer designates a successor; sometimes the owner of the house names one.
So says Patrick McCarthy, chairman and editorial director of Fairchild Publications Inc.
“Designers never plan for it, even when they’re old,” he says. “It’s one of those businesses where people don’t want to talk about retirement. Their feeling is, when I die, the house dies with me. Sometimes it goes on, sometimes not.”
If it does go on, McCarthy adds, it’s with a designer, not a design team. These days of fashion celebritydom demand it. And when that new person does take the reins, she’s faced with an instant challenge: Put her own signature on the line while not alienating existing customers.
“They must share a sensibility,” McCarthy explains. “Holly knew she wanted the line continued, and there has to be a connection between her work and her successor’s work. You can’t suddenly go from Holly Harp to John Galliano.”
If there is consistency in the collection, there’s also consistency in the family business. The Harps’ son Thomas, 29, a recent Wharton School MBA, is CEO.
What would Holly think of Michelson’s success so far?
“I think she would be, ‘You go, girl,’ ” Michelson says. “I think she would be really excited about where it’s going and my courage in trying to work through things in the business. I’d think she’d be saying, ‘Right on.’ ”
Amy Michelson for Holly Harp and HH by Amy Michelson are available at Saks Fifth Avenue, the Alley in West Hollywood and Bergdorf Goodman in New York; Amy Michelson Wedding is available at the Montclair Collection in Santa Monica.
