Earlier this week, news broke that Vince co-founders Rea Laccone and Christopher LaPolice had resigned from the company. Today, in the revolving door that is the fashion industry, we learned that another designer who recently left the label she founded will join Vince as creative director: Doo-Ri Chung.
Is designers leaving their namesake labels a new trend? Just a couple of months after Simon Spurr announced his departure from six year old label Simon Spurr, WWD is reporting that Doo-Ri Chung has decided to leave Doo.Ri, the clothing company she founded in 2001.
Like Spurr’s move, Chung’s is difficult to understand. WWD offers zero details on why Chung left or what she plans to do next and, by all accounts, the label had a pretty good couple of years. She dressed Michelle Obama for a state dinner honoring South Korea (Chung is Korean-American) and designed a high-profile Macy’s capsule collections–two projects that boosted the designer’s name recognition significantly.
You might not be too familiar with New York-based designer Doo-ri Chung. Despite her serious fashion cred (her first job out of Parsons was working in Geoffrey Beene‘s sample room with Alber Elbaz) and being able count First Lady Michelle Obama as a client, she still considers herself a “very small, very young” niche designer without a ton of name recognition. But that should change come February 15, when her capsule collection for Macy’s contemporary fashion department ‘Impulse’ hits 185 stores and goes up on line. Chung is the latest in an impressive list of designers to design capsule collectons for the mass retailer–a list that includes names like Karl Lagerfeld, Giambattista Valli and Matthew Williamson (to name a few).
We got a chance to chat with Chung yesterday as she previewed her collection–a wearable mix of Chung’s signature draped jersey pieces priced between $39 and $159–at hot Hell’s Kitchen resto Danji. In these collab-happy times (in the last few months alone we’ve seen Versace for H&M, Jason Wu for Target, and Missoni for Target work shoppers into a frenzy) Chung was still hesitant about doing a collaboration.
As I was spring cleaning my closet the other day, I relegated an old Thakoon for Target striped t-shirt to the “workout clothes” pile. Later that same week, though, I wore his three-year-old white Gap shirt to work. The paradox got me thinking: Designer collaborations are more abundant than ever, but as the pieces age, Read more →
