For These Designers, Mom Knew Best

IN “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Oscar Wilde wrote: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. mulberry sale That’s his.” Fashion designers get around this problem by incorporating their mother’s way of dressing into their work. On the occasion of Mother’s Day, several shared their primal style memories.
Son of Mei-Yung Wu, shown with him at right

My mom directly influenced where I am today. She wasn’t only encouraging, she went out of her way, and all before I was a teenager. It was an unusual circumstance at the time. The education system in Taiwan was a bit stifling and I wasn’t the best student in the classroom. When I was 9 she moved my brother and I to Vancouver. We had a neighbor who made upholstery so she would give me scraps of leftover fabric, and in the beginning I was gluing it together and sewing it by hand. And then I asked my mom for a sewing machine, and she bought me a used Singer. She doesn’t know how to sew, so she hired a fashion student to teach me.

She was a stylish woman. She wore a lot of Yves Saint Laurent. She was a restaurant owner and then a full-time mother, and she had a great affinity for beauty and design. I remember her hair was always done, like in a low chignon. mulberry handbag She always felt like I need to be true to myself and embrace things that have a quality of longevity to them.

When we moved to Canada in the early ’90s, most of the immigrants moved into new houses and my mom bought an 80-year-old house and furnished it with all antiques. She took me to all these antique shows while all my friends had new homes. Back then I was embarrassed, and now my office is all antiques! She knew good taste before I knew what good taste was. My mother was very out of the box. She taught me to always buy something that you’re going to want in 30 or 40 years, not something you want just right now.

GEORGINA CHAPMAN, 36

Daughter of Caroline Wonfor

My mother was a very stylish woman with her own sense of style. It always fascinated me watching her get dressed when I was a little girl. It was the ’80s so it was a more flamboyant time. I used to sneak in and try on her lipstick when she had left and experiment with it a little. She had this YSL smoking jacket with diamante buttons that I remember just loving.

From quite a young age I remember my mother taking me shopping with her. She was very sweet, she would let me pick out her outfits. God knows what she must have looked like. We would go to the High Street or up to Sloane Square in London, to Peter Jones. That was back when all the punk kids were hanging out there, so I used to love that.

She definitely wears my dresses. Not all of them, but there are certainly ones she likes to wear. And she’ll give me little notes like, you know, “There should be a little bit more along the sleeve or a bit of this with the hemline.” She always had a classic, tailored style.

ISAAC MIZRAHI, 49

Son of Sarah Mizrahi

My mother was born in Brooklyn but her parents were Syrian Jews from Aleppo. She finished college, which was very strange for girls of that background, and married my father very late, around 35 years old. She still lives in Brooklyn, she plays a lot of bridge and splits her time between Brooklyn, New Jersey on the shore and Florida.

She was a very stylish dresser for her world. She would shop at Loehmann’s with the occasional Saks or Bergdorf’s purchase, and she was very good at manipulating things to make them look more expensive than they were. I remember my sister was going to prom, around 1970, and she saw this little pink sleeveless cashmere sweater with maribou feathers, and my mom bought a pink sweater and sewed feathers on and it looked just like it.

She really understood how to focus, it was all about the shoes or the belt. And if something was a good piece of clothing it was “impoorrrtant,” not important, “impoorrrtant.”

I was way overweight as a kid, and my mom had these crazy rules about what made people look fat or not, like all the boys in school wore platform shoes — they were very in at the time — but my mother wouldn’t let me because she said they made you look fat.

I started making clothes when I was really young and it made my mother’s life easy because she never wore anything but my clothes. She was the first person I dressed.