Ivy Leaguers Get Glitzy

Harvard University’s spring semester started Wednesday, but senior Lewis Remele hasn’t been to class yet. He has been too busy preparing for the debut of his women’s collection yesterday during Fashion Week.So you want to be a designer? It can be as difficult – or as easy – as getting into Harvard. Mr. Remele, an art history and architecture major, is just one of several Ivy Leaguers making a go in the glitzy, and none too brainy, business of fashion. Along the way, they’re helping to change the perception of where the Ivy League can take you.“Harvard has helped me. I really wanted a full liberal arts education. On the flip side, when people find out that I went to Harvard, well, some think it’s an interesting niche, and others don’t,” he said.Perhaps he’s a trailblazer. “Fashion is atypical for Harvard,” Mr. Remele said, “but that’s starting to change. Federated and the Gap are recruiting on campus. It used to be students saw banking as the only career option. Now a lot of people are interested in the business side of fashion.”Traditionally, the preppy campuses for an academic elite have groomed men and women for Wall Street, consulting and law firms, and the White House.Today, though, the axis of power has shifted. Popular culture rules, and there’s a strong sense among these overachieving coeds that the real leaders in society are the people making music, fashion, television, and film.Harvard graduates still determine interest rates and foreign policy, but they are also emerging as pop culture movers and shakers. The power list starts with Conan O’Brien and includes the writing staffs of “Seinfeld,” “Saturday Night Live,” “The Daily Show,” and other hit shows.Two women who’ve done a lot to change attitudes about Ivy League fashion are the actresses Claire Danes (a Yalie) and Natalie Portman (a Cantab), whose red carpet turns, often with a hot young designer on their arm, wind up in the pages of Us Weekly.What is happening outside the Ivory Tower is also happening inside. Harvard students look cooler these days. They wear contacts instead of thick glasses, yoga pants instead of bulky sweatshirts, and, thanks to classmate Lewis Remele, designer instead of off-the-rack dresses to their final club formals.A Minneapolis native, Mr. Remele is the designer and namesake of the Lewis Albert label. Several other Harvard students are also part of the company. Senior Elizabeth Whitman, a New Yorker who graduated from Brearley, is the chief executive who secured the financing for the show. She has a law school acceptance that she has decided to defer a year in order to run Lewis Albert. She and Mr. Remele live in Quincy House.Is it a Cantab fashion conspiracy? Probably not, but there are several Harvard graduates in the profession. One veteran is the menswear designer John Bartlett, who studied sociology in Cambridge and once held a fashion show at the Harvard Club.In the freshman class is the high-end tie designer who started his business while a student at Ramaz, Baruch Shemtov.One of the advantages of being on the Harvard campus is the chance to meet celebrities who might someday wear your clothes. Unfortunately, Mr. Remele hadn’t started designing when Ms. Portman was still in school (they overlapped a year), but judging from his show yesterday, his designs would look gorgeous on her.Opportunity knocks frequently on that redbrick-filled campus. As members of the Hasty Pudding club, Mssrs. Remele and Shemtov will get to meet the club’s man and woman of the year, Richard Gere and Halle Berry, at a ceremony in their honor on February 16.Mr. Shemtov will present Ms. Berry with one of his new women’s T-shirts, with a fur collar. Mr. Gere will receive a tie.If Harvard’s fashionistas are just warming up, the established fashion feeder school – for consumers and designers – is Brown University. Its unstructured curriculum has long attracted New Yorkers of privilege, who make regular pilgrimages back to Scoop.The Brown graduate causing a stir this Fashion Week is Lyn Devon of the class of 2002, a New Yorker who attended Brearley and Trinity.(The Ivy League designers often have a private school pedigree; Mr. Remele attended the Blake School in Minneapolis.) She joins a well-established alumna, Amanda Brooks, the former creative director of Tuleh who is now working on a book on fashion.Ms. Devon had her first show on Wednesday, having left Ralph Lauren last year. Like Mr. Remele, she treasures her education. “At Brown, I acquired all this knowledge that I fall back on,” Ms. Devon said.The people-watching was an inspiration. “You sort of felt the campus was a walking fashion show at times,” Ms. Devon said. She used to watch the “Providence kids on the street, with a punk look, piercings, tattoos,” as well as the girls walking around Rhode Island School of Design and Brown. “There are real sophisticated sensibilities: There was grunge, the international element, and just the very creative on the RISD side.”There were the daughters of two famous designers, Diane von Furstenberg and Carolina Herrera, too.The exposure helps the designers understand their target customers. “Being surrounded by smart, intense people with a wide range of interests trained me to work well with the kind of people that are today my clients,” the interior designer and Harvard graduate Celerie Kemble said.Told the designer of the show he was about to see was a Harvard student, a Bloomingdale’s buyer said, “But does he sew?”The answer is yes, but Mr. Remele didn’t learn at Harvard. He has taken summer and night courses at fashion colleges in New York and Boston, and also interned for designer Derek Lam.Ms. Devon learned sewing and draping in Brown’s theater department – and practiced in her dorm room, where she kept a sewing machine and dress form. She was an intern in the costume department of the Metropolitan Opera and at Zac Posen.The Ivy League is about much more than sewing. It’s a network, a talent pool that can help one onto the fast track. If it wields influence on the Street, why not on Seventh Avenue?“You forge great bonds of friendship and intellectual bonds,” Ms. Devon said. “And there’s a sense of history that makes it so much easier to work with people. Everybody helps each other; that’s what makes going to these schools so wonderful. It’s an automatic support system.”Do the schools endorse their students’ pursuit of the superficial? “Harvard really is encouraging of fashion, perhaps more than any other school,” Mr. Shemtov said. He cited the numerous dress-up events on campus.Mr. Remele’s father, a lawyer and magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, said he thought the university could be much more flexible. “The engineering department feels it, too – that it’s difficult for students to pursue entrepreneurial ventures and honor their academic commitments at the same time,” Mr. Remele said.In the end, the professors wield little power over their students’ fashion careers.“I don’t care where he went to school if the collection is sellable and he can produce it,” the buyer from Bloomingdale’s said. After the show, he added, “He’s off to a good start.”“Neither customers, nor editors, pay much attention to schooling. In fashion, talent is talent whether one learned one’s skills at Central St. Martins, FIT, Princeton, or outside the world of formal education,” Vogue’s special projects editor, Alexandra Kotur, said.While that may be true, it was school connections that got Ms. Kotur’s editor, Anna Wintour, to the Lewis Albert show.“I’m here because my daughter is a friend of a friend of the designer,” Ms. Wintour said.Her presence – and the fact that she chatted with Mr. Remele afterward – made an impression. “She’s never spoken to me, so you’re ahead of me already,” the fashion writer Lynn Yaeger said.

Ivy Leaguers Get Glitzy

Ivy Leaguers Get Glitzy

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