Biography: Carolina Herrera
There are few fashion designers with a better reputation than Carolina Herrera. She may not be the best known designer in the world but this is mainly because she has tended to stick to the high end of the market. The result is that her company is one of the most successful fashion houses in New York.
Carolina Herrera was born in Venezuela in the late nineteen thirties, she came from a very wealthy family and had a privileged background. Here farther was an air force officer who would go on to become the governor of Caracas. When she was eighteen she married a wealthy land owner with whom she had two daughters but the marriage was short lived. She would later marry a Venezuelan television personality with whom she would have two more daughters. Herrera got her start in fashion in large part because of the way that she dressed herself.
During the seventies and eighties Herrera was quite well known in Venezuela because of her wealthy background and the fact that she was consistently considered to be one of the best dressed women in the country. In the early eighties the family would move to New York when her husband took a job with a magazine there. This is when she made the decision to become a fashion designer. Despite not having any training as a designer she soon became very successful at it and was dressing some of the most famous women in the world. This led to a huge boom in the popularity of her clothes.
Most of the clothes that Carolina Herrera sells are sold through her companies stores. There are five of them spread across the United States. She has focused mainly on very high end fashion so she has tended to stay away from the mass market. However she has recently launched a lifestyle brand which has so far proven to very successful. The current plan is to expand this line in as this is where the greatest opportunity for increased profits lies. This decision demonstrates her skills as a business person, something that has surprised a lot of people.
Over the years a lot of people wrote off Carolina Herrera as nothing more than the child of a wealthy family who had made a career out of being well dressed. This has clearly turned out not to be the case. Her skills as a designer are well recognized as she has won a number of awards in the field. In addition she has also proven herself to be a very shrewd business person, particularly when it comes to marketing. She has been able to build a brand that is very well known and well respected in the world of high fashion and has been able to move into a more mass market type of clothing without hurting the brand.