"First Mary McFadden created her own look, her own face," exclaims famed international makeup artist Pablo Manzoni, "then she went on to create those fabulous clothes. She has always known exactly who she is and what she wants and she is unlike anybody else."
High praise indeed, coming from a man who is known for the creation of some very famous faces, but it was for her uniqueness that McFadden first drew attention, as much as for the great impact of the newness she brought to the fashion scene. Still, it is her clothes that women buy, not her persona; yet, how marvelous it is to have a grande dame of fashion look the part. Not for McFadden is the shapeless unkempt look of the contemporary young Japanese designers nor the streetwise sweat-clothes clones of the overcasual that so many fashion figures have embraced, citing the streets as the major inspiration for their lines.
McFadden's ideas spring from sources far afield of today's urban scene. More than any other American designer, she has turned to the classic age of ancient Greece and Rome, to the perfumed court, life of old China and its silks, to the timeless flowing robes of the Middle East and the pre-Columbian world. Features of these various garments turned into contemporary clothes of luxurious fabric and detailing have become such a hallmark of McFadden's that, in a room full of elegantly dressed women, the knowing eye can pick out her clothes at once.
And, in any such gathering of chic and formally gowned women, there will undoubtedly be any number of McFaddens to spot. At the atmospheric price ranges at which her clothes are retailed, McFadden consistently outsells all of her competitors at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, the largest of the high fashion specialty chains. The McFadden customer tends to be more than that - she becomes a collector, returning to buy year after year from each new line, in spite of the fact that the clothes wear exceedingly well, are meticulously made, and are timeless in style.
Such client loyalty is not earned easily. Even for the best-known designers, each new line is a gamble, a nerve-wracking test of the creative ability to keep pace with consumer tastes, the latter a notoriously fickle point on which to chance the high stakes of bringing out several lines of new clothes every year. Costs, tempers, and anxieties run high in the hectic cycle of designing and making the samples that are shown both to store buyers and the fashion press during that seasonal ordeal known as market week. It is then that fortunes, and reputations, are made or broken, at least for the season.
It is the rare house and designer who command the continuous affections of press and public alike, whose look is so defined and accepted that the edge is taken off the seasonal ordeal somewhat by the knowledge that there is a large enough following among its customers to weather any temporary setbacks that occur in the natural course of the business.
The loyalty of the McFadden customer is solidly based. It doesn't rest on the designer's initials prominently flaunted on belt buckles or woven into fabrics or waved on pennant like scarves, or any of the other so-called status-symbol emblems that have created so much mischief in what men and women wear and carry during the past decade and a half. The McFadden label is sewn firmly on the inside of each garment,
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