Body Electric

In two short years, Prabal Gurung made a name for himself with a hip take on sophisticated classics. Now, with his tea-length color-block dresses, he’s taking his fashion game to the next level 

by Anne Slowey of Elle 

Social media may fill your life with faux friends, but as rising designer Prabal Gurung discovered, it can also fill your bank account with real money. “When I first launched two years ago, Demi Moore tweeted how much she wanted to see my collection,” says Gurung, whose modern-yet-elegant spring line was a 2011 standout. “So I signed up on Twitter to say thank you.” And the post went viral. Within two days, the Room, a Toronto boutique known for ferreting out new talent, had seen the tweet and immediately picked up the line. Today, Gurung has more than 12,000 Twitter followers, but more important, his clothes have gone from being carried in five stores to more than 30 today. “For spring we added Net-A-Porter and Dover Street Market,” he says of the influential London retailers. “We’re lucky to be getting just the right stores to help build the brand.”
Courage comes in a variety of guises, but for rookie designers it often takes the form of daring to be different. Still, ideas that come out of left field often stay there, but Gurung’s intuitions seem to jibe with what women want. When he launched his collection, many young designers were getting traction with biker jackets and second-skin dresses. Gurung debuted with exquisitely executed feminine blouses, polished eveningwear, and cashmere car coats. Retailers and editors alike were smitten. “I’m not interested in trends,” he says. “I don’t want to be the designer following Phoebe Philo with camel the season after she did it.”
For spring, Gurung pushed the idea of classic refinement further with double-face satin jackets and strapless cocktail dresses. Finishing details follow the tradition of quality European craftsmanship: hand-sewn linings, hand-cut chiffon tiers, and individually beaded crystal embellishments. Gurung also played with color-blocking and tea-length hemlines, elements that can be a challenge to wear, to put it mildly. But what could have gone terribly wrong for a designer in his sophomore year proved a highlight of the season. Prabal’s featherweight knit cashmere dresses in turquoise with orange and poppy geometric shapes showed he was a designer with trenchant vision, not just a guy competing for the next cash award. “I wanted to do a collection that said something about length, but I didn’t want it to be too serious,” he says. “So I took ethnic color-blocking and did it with a body-consciousness that was fun.” As for the length? “I just got sick of all these starlets in short, tight dresses that seem so vulgar and old, like Miley Cyrus in dresses so short you could almost see stuff,” he says. “So I dropped the hemline to five inches below the knee. I wanted to slow things down. Fashion now is so much about ‘the look’ that you forget about detail and construction. It took me a month to get some of my patterns correct.”
Getting it right seems to come naturally to the Singapore-born, Nepal-raised designer. Like many youngbloods helping to revitalize the fashion industry with a hip take on sophistication, Garung decided to enter the high-end designer market (dresses range from $1,000 to $5,000) instead of playing it safe in the more moderately priced contemporary arena. The strategy worked. In four seasons, his business has tripled, in part because of trunk shows and collaborations, such as a line of shoes he designed with Nicholas Kirkwood for spring. “It isn’t okay to just be a designer anymore,” he adds. “What’s cool is a designer who can talk about the business.”
Gurung credits his financial sense to his mother, who has ties to Nepal’s royal family and raised him and his brother and sister in Kathmandu. “My mother is a divorced politician,” he says. “That, as you can imagine, is a big deal in a place like Nepal, which is about 50 years behind the rest of the world. It’s one reason I think it’s okay to make mistakes. How else are you going to learn?”
By age 11, Gurung was drawing gowns on stick figures and offering free fashion advice. “Mine is the typical gay-designer story,” he says. “I was taunted and teased, but I had a pile of sketchbooks and a teacher and family who encouraged me.” After graduating from an all-boys Catholic high school, he traveled to India to study fashion. Eventually he attended Parsons in New York, where in short order he won the Best Designer award at the annual Parsons/FIT design competition and landed a job at Cynthia Rowley. Two years later, Gurung got a call from the higher-ups at Bill Blass. “I thought, Bill Blass?” he says. “But then I went to visit the atelier and realized it was on the level of the best European houses; it was a place where I could experience the best the world had to offer.”
In the five years Gurung worked at Blass—ultimately becoming design director—he developed key relationships. “Two of my Blass colleagues left to come with me,” Gurung says. The team worked out of the designer’s East Village studio. When he couldn’t pay them—for a year—they sold their belongings to pay rent. Today, the company remains entirely self-financed. And recently, Gurung, whose cashmere is manufactured in Nepal, was able to open the Nepal Himalayan Foundation for Education and Leadership to provide education to underprivileged children.
In a perfect world, having the clout and cash to start a charity would be the best measure of success. But since we’re not there yet, Prabal can also crow about the fact that celebrities, such as Rachel Weisz, Kate Hudson, and Zoe Saldana, are lining up to wear his clothes. “I told my mother about Demi Moore wearing my dress, and she said, ‘Let’s wait until you’re dressing the first lady.’ ” Gurung got the call he was waiting for when Michelle Obama wore his red, off-the-shoulder gown to the White House Correspondents’ dinner last spring. “My mother cried and said, ‘You realize this success is no longer yours. It’s part of something bigger now.’ Needless to say, my mother never cries.”

Source: http://www.elle.com/Fashion/Fashion-Spotlight/Prabal-Gurung-s-Color-Block-Dresses