Vera Wang has been a worldwide fashion icon for decades, but achieving her dream of becoming a fashion designer wouldn’t begin to take shape until she was 40 years old, and was born out of necessity. When she was young, Vera wanted to become an Olympic figure skater. But when she failed to make the Olympic team in 1968, it was time to find another passion, and fashion soon took the place of skating.
She landed a job at Vogue soon after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1971, thanks to a chance encounter she had with a top Vogue executive while in school. She had wanted to attend design school, but her father refused to pay for more schooling. Vera held on to her dream for nearly two decades before making the leap. She worked at Vogue for 17 years and became the magazine’s youngest ever Senior Fashion Editor. Then she spent two years working for Ralph Lauren as Design Director.
Starting Over After 40
Then it happened. The thing that led Vera to launch her empire: she got engaged.
While shopping for wedding dresses, usually with much younger women, she found that there weren’t many dresses suitable for a 40-year-old woman. She couldn’t find a dress that appealed to her, that she could relate to. The dresses she saw were all very traditional and all very similar.
“There’s so many different kinds of women, and bridal fashion never reflected that,” she said in an interview with the Oxford Union. “It reflected the image of a bride, but not of women.”
At the time, Vera was working at Ralph Lauren, but he didn’t want to design her wedding dress in case she didn’t like it, and she was worried he might get mad if she asked for changes. So they agreed it would be best if she designed it herself. Ironically, it was Vera’s father, who had refused to pay for design school, who identified the business opportunity in front of his daughter. He believed there were likely more women out there like her, who wanted a dress that was truly special and inventive. He urged her to go into business for herself designing wedding dresses.
The next year, in 1990 at the age of 40, she opened the Vera Wang Bridal House in the Carlyle Hotel in New York City with the vision of providing women with wedding dresses as unique as they are.
Building Her Empire
Three decades later, Vera has expanded her empire beyond wedding dresses to include everyday fashion, eyewear, fragrances and jewelry. She even has her own vodka, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. She likes to end her days with a vodka cocktail.
Now 74, Vera is as vibrant and youthful as ever. She believes that her boundless energy comes from her passion for her work— and the fact that she’s never tried to hang on to her youth.
“I never thought about youth. I never thought about going way out of my way to preserve youth in a fanatical, obsessive way,” she shared in the BBC’s 100 Women series. “I think when you don’t think about aging in that way, maybe it’s, in a way, better. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, healthier. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s a way of dealing with aging that is productive.”
About the author: Stephen Proctor is a freelance writer who also writes for The Cool Down, along with multiple projects currently in various stages of production. Stephen previously worked as a writer and producer at Yahoo! and Hearst Digital Studios.
Photos: Shutterstock
