Courtesy of Elizabeth Giardina
In January, St. Louis native Elizabeth Giardina was named vice president of design, with a focus on ready-to-wear, at Proenza Schouler. In her new role, Giardina is responsible for taking the concepts shown on the runway and “making sure those ideas are product people want to buy and wear,” she says.
Giardina grew up in a house on Arundel Avenue and attended Clayton schools, where she was happiest in the art room and with the art teachers. “I felt a lot of success with teachers who appreciated my personality,” she says. After school, she was involved in jazz and modern dance at COCA, and this past weekend she returned to the arts organization to teach a master class on fashion design to high school students.
We met up with Giardina for coffee and conversation at her parent’s apartment overlooking Forest Park. Dressed in a black Jil Sander shirtdress and strappy leather sandals, the designer talked about life in fashion, the power of dance, and how the books that surrounded her childhood impacted her career goals.
Courtesy of Elizabeth Giardina
Elizabeth Giardina, vice president of design at Proenza Schouler
What advice do you have for people who aspire to work in fashion or the visual arts? What will you be sharing with your students? We’re going to talk a little bit about fashion and process, but it’s really about experiencing the process of making clothes. There’s so much that goes into building a collection, but there’s a lot of ways to think about designing clothing in terms of, "Do you start from sketching? Do you start from collaging? Do you start from working with vintage garments? Or from draping?" So I think we can explore all those different ways to making a garment, and I think that will be really interesting.
You’ve been in your new position for about eight months. Can you tell us about it? It still feels very new, because I was in my last job for six years working for Derek Lam. I’m working as vice president of design focused on ready-to-wear. My job is to build the collection for anything that’s outside of the runway. So on the runway you may see 40 looks. Everything else, I’m responsible for. It’s quite a lot of product. It means working with Jack [McCollough] and Lazaro [Hernandez], the co-founders, very, very closely—being part of their process but then also working with my team, making sure we’re fulfilling everything that we need commercially. So, as you know, you can look at a runway show, and it can be really creative, conceptual, a lot of ideas, and it’s our job to make sure those ideas are product people want to buy and wear.
So, Jack and Lazaro, they design the runway and you design everything else… A lot of what I work on is… What is the great button-down? The pair of pants that you want? But also maybe there’s a jacket that’s really beautiful, but it’s double-breasted, and oversized, and really long. How do we take that idea and make it more wearable? It’s interesting because every place I’ve worked is really, really different and that’s a lot of what I’ll be talking about today. There’s no set way to design a collection. There’s no set way a design team works.
My last job, at the Derek Lam Collection Team, everyone was very involved in designing for the runway. These guys [at Proenza Schouler] are hyper-focused on the runway and then my team supports all those efforts. What I feel really, really feel blessed about—not to be cheesy—is that I’ve worked for a number of designers who are true designers, who all sketch, all drape, so I’ve never worked for a person who is just an idea person, and then we’re executing on those ideas. It’s an extremely creative process, and our team is integrated and the co- founders are doing everything that we’re doing, which is amazing. This isn’t always the case in design companies. I’ve never been handed a mood board and been told, "Sketch from here.”
Why do you think you were chosen for this position? What do you think they liked about your experience and your vision? It’s a lot about relationships. So I met them through somebody… Actually, the reason I met with Jack and Lazaro is that I had heard several times that they liked what I was doing at 10 Crosby, which is interesting because 10 Crosby is a contemporary not a designer price point. They liked the product I was doing there, and I’d heard that a couple of times. A friend said, ‘I think you should meet with them.’ And then I had been connected to Andrew Rosen, who owns Theory and Helmut Lang; he’s a big investor in Rag and Bone and he’s also involved in Proenza Schouler. He recommended me to them as well. It happened at once.
Courtesy of Elizabeth Giardina
10 Crosby
I read that Proenza Schouler showed in Paris for the first time. Is that something that will continue? We’re doing it again next season. So one of our initiatives for this year is to change the way our calendar works. Instead of having four collections a year, having pre-collections, and having main collections—Resort, Spring, Pre-Fall, and Fall—we have two collections. Traditionally, a New York fashion company in the last couple of decades has had two big runway shows and then two collections where you’ll have a photo shoot and you’ll have it on vogue.com. So now we’re doing two main themes a year, and that’s a really big part of what I’m working on: making sure that when we have these two main collections, we have enough product to support it.
How do you think your childhood in St. Louis impacted you? Does anything stand out to you as having influenced you in the career choice that you ultimately made? Oh, for sure. I say this all the time. My mom has always been really interested in creative people and style, and she used to have all these books like Women of Style, The Power of Style… I think that was interesting to me: how people live their lives, how they decorate their lives, what their personal style is like, what their home is like, what decisions they make, what decisions they don’t make. It’s not necessarily to me about money. It’s about making these kinds of decisions that affect your life in terms of beauty. So that was always really interesting.
I was also really interested in dance growing up: Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Sammy Davis Jr., Alvin Ailey, American Ballet, New York City Ballet, all of the great dancers. I think those things go hand-in-hand. Dancers are so much about how they hold themselves, their style, their movement. I was a huge Bob Fosse fan. I had a PBS documentary about him and used to watch it over and over again.
In terms of the fall season, what should women be thinking about? What should we be excited about fashion-wise? This is a tough one. I don’t really—I’m such a bad fashion designer for saying this—but I don’t believe a lot in trend. I really believe in style and finding what makes you feel comfortable and beautiful and locking into that. If you have a beautiful double-faced cashmere coat, and you also have a jean jacket, and you want to layer those things for fall, that’s great. And I think part of the challenge of being a fashion designer is creating something that feels new and feels exciting and that people want to buy, but also letting people feel like it can be part of their life. Ideally, for me, fashion should be something that can become your style. And I hate the idea that next season the coat is not attractive.
Where do you go for your inspiration? It changes all the time. I try to see as much as I can. I see a lot of art, I travel, I like to be around people that are inspiring. It’s about being interested in what is happening in culture, and sometimes it’s just not being and checking out.
Who do you admire in the fashion world in terms of their style? There’s a certain kind of woman that’s really exciting to me. My husband always says my demographic is women in their 60s. I love women who don’t give a s**t. They know what they look good in. They wear it, and they have a style. You think about Patti Smith: over-size blazers, skinny jeans, and her hair’s not brushed. But she looks really cool. She looks like someone’s who’s locked into something. I think older women are better examples of that than younger women, because younger women are still struggling to figure that out, who they are, what role they want to play in their lives in terms of their careers and their families and all of that. But designers? Phoebe Philo of Céline is perfection. I see those runway shows and it’s like, "I want those pants. I want that shirt, and I know how I would wear them." That’s a wardrobe. And there’s a sense of power in that. The women who wear those clothes feel really powerful. And you know, in the last eight years she’s really dominated because of that.
So clothes still hold that role for women. One-hundred percent. I’m working so hard to make really expensive designer clothes and you know, it’s like, "Wow, other people do really great things for humanity." But if you’re creating something, it’s more than the garment. You’re creating an attitude that helps how people think about themselves. I think there’s a lot of value in that.
As for the last collection, what should we take note of? I would look at their show. The ruffle dresses are really beautiful. I ordered one of them, and I’m not a ruffle persona. There is a floral coat that is to die for; it has a corsetry construction. I want it, but I need to have a more fabulous lifestyle. But you’d feel like a million dollars wearing it.
