In early 2018, Mrs. Herrera picked Wes Gordon, a highly-esteemed but not particularly well-known (outside of the industry, at least) independent designer, to assume the creative role at her iconic fashion house. Since then, he’s reconnected the brand with the bold, confident, fun-loving (yet eternally elegant) woman who has always been the house muse—attracting a multitude of modern women, from Lena Waithe to Meghan Markle, to dress along the way. "I'm not here to build something that doesn't already exist; I'm here to redecorate a little bit," he tells his friend and Modette Hayley Bloomingdale (who wore a Carolina Herrera dress designed by Wes for her recent nuptials). Here, they discuss Wes before he was Wes, the advice he’s received from Mrs. Herrera and the things every “Carolina woman” has in common. Read on.
Hayley Bloomingdale: Let’s start with the “making of Mr. Wes Gordon”. Can you set the scene with a bit of background?
Wes Gordon: I grew up in Chicago and Minneapolis and then primarily in Atlanta. From an early age I was very fixated on what I’d wear. I wouldn’t go to preschool without my red suspenders and navy suede shoes. The suspenders were fabulous but also practical because I looked like one of those little kids who swallowed a basketball.
H.B.: Well that is the most adorable image ever. Clearly, a fashion superstar in the making from preschool!
W.G.: My mom was working at the time and I would sit in her closet every morning and stomp my feet and tell her what she had to wear.
H.B.: Yes and not much has changed: you still stomp your feet and say, “put this on!”
W.G.: Yes, well, old habits die hard. In school, art class was always my favorite, and I started loving film and cinema. I loved this idea of this escapism, this world created from a dream and the power of visual image, the power of clothes and set design. In my early teens I started understanding that this love I had, this passion, was a career that you could be lucky enough to make your life. So I knew I wanted and needed to work in fashion.
H.B.: How did you make that happen from Atlanta?
W.G.: At the time, there wasn’t really a way for this to happen for me. Today, with the internet, the world’s become so much smaller; you can become a fashion scholar from the most remote part of the world. At the time, though, Atlanta didn’t have a fashion community so I was kind of left with the few books I could find. I had a used Valentino book and a Galliano book and a few others and they became my fashion textbooks. One thing I kept coming across in the these books was Central Saint Martins, the art and design school in London. I knew nothing about it and it wasn’t like I had a college counselor in Atlanta who knew anything about it but I just knew I had to go there. It was my Hogwarts, and if I wanted to be a wizard, I had to go to Hogwarts. If I wanted to be in fashion, I had to go to Central Saint Martins.
H.B.: YES. Love me a good Hogwarts reference! So you were destined to be sorted into Gryffindor at Central Saint Martins and be a perfect fashion wizard from then on out?
W.G.: That was the plan. After school I did art classes and I found a little lady who gave me sewing lessons. I built an art portfolio and miraculously got in. So I packed up my bags and moved to London for four years. It was so much fun; this was like Hoxton London, Boombox London, Hedi-Slimane-at-Dior-skinny-jeans-and-graphic-T-shirts London, Pete-Doherty-and-Amy-Winehouse London.
H.B.: Ah, yes, so the super cool London?
W.G.: Yes, super cool London, but also, like, not very “me”—and that’s why it was so fun. I had the greatest time. During those four years, I spent two summers interning with Mr. de la Renta at Oscar and I remember spending my entire savings on a wardrobe to wear to my internship. I was the most dapper intern you’d ever seen, with multiple colors of pressed linen suits. I was broke but I looked incredible.
H.B.: And that’s what matters, naturally!
W.G.: That’s all that matters! Tom Ford had just started his men’s collection in London around the same time. It was a small office on King’s Road—there were about five people working there—so I got a part time job after school and on weekends helping them out, researching and working with the design team.
H.B.: And then you left London?
W.G.: Well, with the naiveté and ambition of youth, I decided I would move to New York City and start my own collection. And the wonderful, magical thing about fashion—and you guys at Moda are such great champions of this—is that it’s an industry where you can actually be a 23-year-old and start your own business.
H.B.: 100%. At Moda, we love our young designers. But how did it all work?
W.G.: I started super small, with a handful of pieces that I showed in a hotel room during Fashion Week. It was a horrible blizzard and I stood there all day doing a rolling presentation just holding my pieces and talking about them to whomever came in. People turned up dripping with snow and we ordered them hot chocolate from room service—I remember that the hot chocolate was the most expensive part of the entire presentation!
H.B.: Great idea, I would be so excited about the hot chocolate! And so who were you designing for at the time? Who was the Wes Gordon woman?
W.G.: I always loved this romantic idea of Carolyn Bessette, the uptown-goes-downtown woman, or the Tribeca-residing lady: taking elegant clothing but doing it in a way that’s not intimidating or which doesn’t feel vintage. For me, getting the chance to meet the women who were trying on my clothes and hearing their feedback and seeing how they’d wear it, that was the equivalent of ten years of design school. So one collection basically just fueled the next. I did it for eight years, and I always say fashion years are like dog years so it was a LONG time.
H.B.: A really long time. But you had some major hits back then. That’s about the time when we met and I remember you had a Gwyneth moment, a Katy Perry moment…
W.G.: We did Michelle Obama! I did the Vogue Fashion Fund a couple times, I had some Moda trunkshows—you guys were always super supportive. It was a great, wild, busy time.
H.B.: Ok, so fast forward and, one day, Mrs. Herrera came to you and was like, “Hi, come work with me!”?
W.G.: After eight years I was getting to the point where I was ready for the next chapter. It’s a really tough business and I found I was spending less time doing the creative part, which was what I loved. Around that time I met with Mrs. Herrera about consulting. Our first meeting was meant to be five minutes long but we ended up staying in there for an hour, talking about everything but fashion. That is a real connection point for us, that neither of us define ourselves by our job; we just have a passion for beautiful things. A flower arrangement, a chair, a movie, a dress…
H.B.: So you two just clicked from the beginning. Weren’t you nervous about filling those shoes?
W.G.: Totally nervous! I mean, she is truly an icon. We’d walk down the street and she’d stop traffic. She is just epic and so stylish—and she has these one-liners that are just perfection.
H.B.: Did she have any great advice for you?
W.G.: She had two big pieces of advice for me that I try to think of all the time. One is more cultural, the idea that “happy people make happy clothes”. So the environment at Herrera is very community-focused. You know it, you’ve been to our offices: it’s such a unique place. Everyone takes a one-hour lunch break and eats together; no one is allowed to eat at their desks. The other one was this idea that “sometimes the bravest, most modern, most revolutionary thing to do is to be elegant”. And I think this sums her up completely. There’s pressure to chase the trends but sometimes you just need to stand your ground and say “no I like this because this is beautiful.” It’s a courageous thing to do.
H.B.: I love this! In a world of Kardashians in their bike shorts, this is a great motto.
W.G.: There is no one who better embodies the idea of standing by your own taste and believing in it than Mrs. Herrera. And I really took this to heart. She is the strongest woman you’ll ever meet. Oh! And it’s her birthday today!
“This woman laughing with her head thrown back, dancing on a chair, full of confidence: this is our woman.”
H.B.: What a perfect day for this interview!
W.G.: I spent so long trying to build my own brand from scratch and there is something so lovely about coming into a place that already has such beautifully defined architecture. The walls are in place, there’s a floor plan. I'm not here to build something that doesn't already exist; I'm here to redecorate a little bit.
H.B.: That's exactly what I think you’ve done. There is of course a lot of “Carolina Herrera” DNA in your collections but they are also so very you, so colorful and fun and full of pieces that every woman would want to wear.
W.G.: That woman, the life-of-the-party woman, she has always been our woman. This woman laughing with her head thrown back, dancing on a chair, full of confidence: this is our woman. I think that really resonates with the world right now. It’s a bleak, uncertain world we’re living in and it’s okay for a dress to be fabulous and pink. It’s okay to wake up and go to your wardrobe and take out a pair of floral yellow pants that bring you a little bit of joy. Right now, we have to find joy wherever we can and hold on to it.
H.B.: That’s exactly how I feel about that red dress of yours I have. It makes me so happy, I put it on and everything is better.
W.G.: The antidote to bleakness and sadness is beauty and joy!
H.B.: And color!
W.G.: Yes, one of the things I did here was to ban dusty colors... if we want red, it’s RED.
H.B.: That is evident in your Pre-Fall collection. Gorgeous, unabashedly bold colors and prints. Was that the intention when you were creating it?
W.G.: Yes—and for all my collections. I think the rules about seasonality are just kind of gone. It can be casual or fancy or warm or lightweight: it can be all in one. Every season is just a chance to outdo yourself and do a better job than you did a few months before.
H.B.: Do you think about a moment, an Instagram moment or a celebrity moment, when designing?
W.G.: I think about moments that I love and how we can update those or recreate them. Some of my favorite recent ones are Saoirse Ronan at the Mary Queen of Scots premiere in that white organza dress; I loved Lena Waithe at the Met Gala in her rainbow cape and I loved Sarah Paulson in her silver gown. Oh and we did Meghan Markle after her wedding; we had a Lady Gaga moment. We’re also dressing Tracee Ellis Ross at the moment: I love her.
H.B.: What a list! All these women are so different physically but have this same energy and confidence in common.
W.G.: Yes, they’re all bold. They’re not followers, they’re not shy. They’re confident women who when they laugh, they laugh loud, and when they march, it’s to their own drum. I think that’s really Herrera.