Vogue ’s Fashion Fund Turns 15! Looking Back on the Prize That Changed American Style

Sally Singer
Updated

Vogue’s Fashion Fund Turns 15! Looking Back on the Prize That Changed American Style

Model Imaan Hammam sports a kinetic look, lush with frond prints, by 2007 Fashion Fund runner-up Phillip Lim and a pair of hoops by 2012 runner-up Jennifer Meyer. For Lim, qualifying for the fund was “like winning the design lottery.” Meyer found it equally revelatory: “The most important people in fashion,” she realized, “actually want to help you and see you succeed!” Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.
The four designers behind Vaquera, a 2017 finalist, prove that sequins do indeed pair well with corduroy. Hammam finishes off the look with hoop earrings by Pamela Love, a 2010 finalist whose Fashion Fund experience mixed bliss and panic—with an AC malfunction the day of her studio visit firmly in the latter camp. “We had to run to Home Depot and buy a new one,” she says. “It was barely installed when the Fashion Fund team walked in the door.”
Hammam wears The Elder Statesman’s sumptuous knitwear—and Marc Alary rings on each finger. “I know this sounds canned,” says The Elder Statesman’s Greg Chait, a 2012 winner, “but all the judges and the people were a treasure chest.” Alary, a runner-up the next year, most enjoyed checking out the competition to see “what the other finalists came up with.”
Kendall Jenner pairs an Altuzarra dress (Joseph Altuzarra was a 2011 winner) with Paul Andrew ankle boots, while Hammam opts for Tabitha Simmons sandals with a Rodarte dress. “Our first presentation with the panel was so scary,” say 2006 runners-up Kate and Laura Mulleavy, of Rodarte. “We practiced questions about business on note cards.” Shoe designer Paul Andrew, a 2014 winner, describes the entire affair as “surreal.”
Jenner nods to the nineties in a sporty look by 2006 finalists Rag & Bone, while Hammam appears monochromatic-chic in last year’s winner, Telfar and, for good measure, Jennifer Fisher’s rings. For Fisher, a 2012 finalist, picking the competition’s pinnacle was easy: “When Anna walked up to me to say, ‘Good job.’ ”
Hammam smolders in a crushed-velvet slip dress by 2015 winner Jonathan Simkhai and dangle earrings by Irene Neuwirth, a 2008 finalist. Beauty note: Amp up the wow factor with a head-turning silhouette. L’Oréal Paris Elnett Satin Hairspray Extra Strong Hold Precious Oil locks strands in place while delivering a soft, luminous finish.
Hammam adds some additional air to her Thom Browne pants. A 2005 runner-up, Browne feels he owes much to his competition. “The professional and personal relationships I made during the Fashion Fund,” he says, “are the most incredible thing to me.”
Jenner is every bit the lady in Brock Collection’s prairie-floral frock and Eddie Borgo earrings. “I can’t imagine establishing Eddie Borgo without the support of the fund,” says the jeweler, a 2010 runner-up. Laura Vassar Brock—who, along with her husband, Kristopher Brock, founded 2016 winner Brock Collection—says, “We spoke to a few friends who had gone through it, and they all said the same thing: that the Fashion Fund is a life-changing experience. And indeed it was!”
Predator or prey? One is never a fashion victim in Proenza Schouler. Jenner sports a tie-dye-and-macramé look by the design duo–the fund’s first-ever winners—and a faux-fur cloche by Albertus Swanepoel. Of the process, Swanepoel, a 2008 runner-up, admits, “The whole thing was pretty scary—and this was before social media!”
With a coordinating beaded skirt, Prabal Gurung’s Nordic knit gets a cocktail-hour touch. To quell stage fright, Gurung, a 2010 runner-up, “taped up photos of all of the judges in my apartment,” he says, “so I could practice in front of them.”
Jenner wraps a Gypsy Sport–clad arm around Hammam, in an Alexander Wang look. Though Gypsy Sport’s Rio Uribe admitted he began the Fashion Fund with “no expectations,” he took the prize in 2015. Another winner, 2008’s Alexander Wang, remembers that “seconds before my name was called saying that I won, my phone started ringing—awkward! My phone stays on silent now.”
Jenner contrasts a Derek Lam silky faille dress in the most sumptuous color with a pair of beaded Brother Vellies gladiators. “I made it through with some semblance of dignity, I hope!” says Lam of the fund’s inaugural class. Brother Vellies designer Aurora James, meanwhile—a 2015 winner—says that without the fund, “I’m not sure I would have expanded my business.” In this story: Hair: Shay Ashual; Makeup: Mark Carrasquillo; Manicure: Adam Slee. Tailor: Della George. Produced by North Six.

In 2003, the filmmaker Douglas Keeve set out to capture the inaugural class of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. He spent most of a year training his cameras on thirteen energetic young designers in need of money, mentoring, and the elusive magic that comes from being anointed “the future” in an industry besotted with what’s next. For any director, this assignment should have been the stuff of magic: cool kids, beautiful clothes, gorgeous models, celebrated judges, and celebrity talking heads—cinematographic proof that Warhol was right and happiness really is a job in New York. But the resulting documentary, Seamless, told a different story (and the footage on the cutting-room floor was even more devastating). Doo-Ri Chung, a 2006 winner, lost her studio when her parents’ dry-cleaning business in New Jersey burned to the ground. Alexandre Plokhov of Cloak, a 2004 runner-up, found himself in the dark—literally—with a collection to finish when his alt-folk, cello-playing business partner went on tour with a punk band without paying the electric bill. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler, winners in 2004, struggled to keep their personal and professional partnership intact in ways that were heartbreaking to behold. Why would anyone want to be a designer, anyway? It all seemed so insurmountably hard.

Of course, this was exactly why the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund was created fifteen years ago: to make the American fashion community more caring, more creative, more conscionable. At Vogue, we had seen how 9/11 toppled the businesses of an entire generation of new creators and had tried to help by funding group shows and solo efforts under the rubric An American View. We had forgone the opportunity to participate in reality-television shows where, by design, entertainment would trump talent. We wanted to face the hard truths of our industry: that the so-called young designers were then in their 40s; that diversity was nonexistent and not discussed; that the gap between the haves and the have-nothings was not only wrong but also fundamentally deadening to a community based on vibrancy. Plokhov was not the only one shrouded in gloom: The lights were going out on American fashion.

And what a difference a competition makes. Fifteen years and 150 finalists later, the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund prize has created global stars, local heroes, a must-watch New York Fashion Week, and, most important, a true sense of community among designers of all ages and backgrounds—all with differing aesthetic and commercial aspirations—who communicate, collaborate, and essentially care for one another through the fun and not-so-fun times. (As Keeve saw in his lens, creativity is never easy, business is always going to be challenging, and life will whack you sideways.) The small comfort of knowing they are not alone has given American designers the freedom to think bigger, bolder, and more beautifully for the world they dress—for all of us, basically. Fifteen years later, we are all winners.

2018 Finalists From left: Matthew Adams Dolan, Rebecca de Ravenel, Christian Cowan, Hunting Season’s Danielle Corona, Luar’s Raul Lopez, Bode’s Emily Adams Bode, Pyer Moss’s Kerby Jean-Raymond, Scosha’s Scosha Woolridge, Batsheva’s Batsheva Hay and Jonathan Cohen. Sittings Editor: Jorden Bickham. Hair: Hiro + Mari for Bumble and Bumble; Makeup: Susie Sobol for Marc Jacobs Beauty.
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