Hall of Fame ACE Award Winner Fern Mallis
The Godmother of New York Fashion
By Roxanne Robinson
For an industry that is subject to change by nature, Fern Mallis is a reassuring presence in a business that is constantly shifting and evolving. Her acumen, knowledge, and professionalism are not only a testament to her character but also welcome traits in a world teeming with overnight, online experts. Founder of Fern Mallis, LLC, an international fashion and design consultancy, Mallis is a celebrated icon of New York fashion — some might even call her the godmother of it all. Mallis was born to the life; it is unquestionably part of her personal and professional DNA. “My Dad was an accessories salesman selling scarves. I grew up with more scarves than you can imagine and knew how to tie them in 800 different ways. I still have many of them,” Mallis told Ac Magazine over Zoom, as she recounted tagging along with her father from Brooklyn into Manhattan to shadow him at work. (Not surprisingly, she was voted best dressed in high school.)
“He was a garmento in the best sense of the word; it was a loving term then. He took me to business lunches with him and my uncles or the buyers and fashion directors he worked with. I loved being in the showroom watching my dad work; he was charming and smart as a whip and loved what he did.”
As this year’s ACE Awards Hall of Fame award recipient, Mallis is recognized for defining today’s industry and especially for her pivotal role in the creation of New York Fashion Week (NYFW). While her career trajectory may have taken some unexpected turns, it’s no surprise to find that through it all, accessories have long held a place close to her heart. “Accessories have always been a part of my life and upbringing.”
FERN’S WINDING PATH
The love of her father’s scarf business helped forge her fashion path in the first place. She spent time hanging out in the art department with the women who hand-designed the scarf collection during those pre-CAD era days. These thriving, creative professional women inspired Mallis’s studies at the University of Buffalo, where she majored in graphics and communication design. There, Mallis participated in the Mademoiselle College Board. “We were like a focus group for the magazine in the late 1960s,” Mallis noted.
Through the College Board program, she won a guest editorship at the magazine with other era participants, including Betsey Johnson, Peggy Noonan, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath. The experience – 20 girls competing for a permanent job while living together at the Barbizon hotel – led to Mallis’s first job at Mademoiselle. “I hope they saw leadership and an eye for style,” she offered.
Later, as fashion director for Gimbels East on 86th Street, she met Calvin Klein, who many years later presented her with the 2013 Pratt Institute Fashion Industry Lifetime Achievement Award. After testing the waters of the brand side of the business, Mallis opened her own PR company, sharing office space with her friends, the architect R. Scott Bromley and interior designer Robin L. Jacobsen, who with Ron Doud designed Studio 54.
This proximity to the design world brought in clients Knoll and Stendig, as well as fashion players, including Selma Weiser of Charivari, the progressive fashion boutique where a young stock boy named Marc Jacobs worked. Helping launch the IDCNY center, which brought together the interior furnishings industry under one roof in Long Island City, was pivotal to Mallis’s later work on NYFW. “I organized that industry by getting the interior designers and architects to come together; that was the forerunner for galvanizing all the fashion designers together via the CFDA.” While the IDCNY center didn’t survive the early 90s recession or the stigma in Long Island City, Queens, fun fact — the only show Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons did in New York was held in the IDCNY garage building.
FERN AND THE CFDA
After Mallis made a name for herself in the business, her early exposure to the inner workings of the industry became an asset. She recalled being impressed in 1991 by the CFDA’s inaugural Seventh on Sale AIDS fundraising event. Though at the time she was temporarily working for the fashion-focused PR firm Loving & Weintraub, and as a founding board member she was very involved in fundraising events for Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA) — she threw her name into the hat for the newly vacant role of executive director at the CFDA. She was brought in for an interview and grilled first by the nominating committee and then by the CFDA board, which included designers Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, and Stan Herman. “They said, ‘You haven't been in fashion for over ten years, why should we hire you?’ I said I never stopped wearing clothes, shopping, or looking at magazines. It’s in my DNA. I grew up in the fashion business, surrounded by it my whole life.” The interview process was challenging, but eventually Mallis was hired.
A short time into her new role, a collapsed ceiling became the impetus for bigger change. During New York Market Week, about six looks into the Michael Kors fashion show, which was held in an empty loft in Chelsea, the ceiling started to crumble. “The models just brushed the plaster off their shoulders, but Suzy Menkes and NY Times fashion critic Carrie Donovan got chunks of plaster in their laps. No one remembers what Michael showed because they were looking for emergency exits,” Mallis recalled. “The next day the press wrote, ‘We live for fashion, we don’t want to die for it.’ And I said ‘I think my job description just changed.’ My mission became finding safe, sound places to hold fashion shows.
The resulting 7th on Sixth tents led to a formalized New York Fashion Week and effectively put New York on the global map next to Paris, Milan, and London. Mallis was also keen to include the accessories community, which, as the 90s minimalism trends grew, wasn’t getting a lot of play on the runway. “It was all about ready-to-wear, and the accessories members were getting annoyed, so we created an accessories group exhibition with designers like Carlos Falchi, Gerard Yosca, and Robert Lee Morris that was initially across that street at what is now the Bryant Park Hotel. We had press conferences with the editors and a daily cocktail hour. Judy Licht from ABC 7 and Elsa Klensch from CNN would cover it. Once we moved the tents onto the lawn in Bryant Park, the accessories were displayed in the fountain with a new theme each season, always highlighting the accessories designers. They always had important place at NYFW,” she said of the initiative.
Philanthropy also continued to play a significant role in her career. While at CFDA, Mallis spearheaded the Fashion Targets Breast Cancer program which was designed by Ralph Lauren, licensed globally to countries such as Brazil, Australia, and the UK, and the Concept Cure initiative with GM and Katie Couric, which championed colorectal cancer.
Ten years after she started, Mallis left CFDA and took a position as the senior VP of IMG Fashion, the global talent and event agency which purchased the 7th on Sixth initiative from CFDA, and her work with NYFW continued on a new level. With the financial support of IMG, the tents took on a larger-thanlife persona as a globally-attended event, daily news coverage from the E Channel, and high profile corporate sponsorships. In this role, Mallis also advised and attended a growing list of ancillary fashion weeks worldwide.
Mumbai was one of those fashion weeks that inspired Mallis’s love of jewelry. “I never had on one necklace; I had four. Why wear one bracelet when I could wear six?” she mused.
Her collection of Indian costume and fine jewelry caught the attention of the brass at QVC, before long her curated jewelry discoveries were launched by the network as Fern Finds. Eventually, she moved over to Mindy Grossman’s HSN and added embroidered slippers and garments for sale under the Fern Finds banner.
FERN TALKS
Today, her cumulative experience, curiosity and vast network make her the perfect host for the 92NY Fashion Icons talks, an event series that has quickly become fashion’s oral history. She has interviewed 65 fashion luminaries, including Tom Ford, Tommy Hilfiger, Bruce Weber, Diane Von Furstenberg, Andre Leon Talley, Valentino, Bill Cunningham, and Calvin Klein. The late Iris Apfel was also a guest.
“Clearly, the most talked about accessories were in my interview with Iris
Apfel. She was the accessories queen; she told me how she started amassing her baubles, beads, and bangles,” Mallis recalled, adding, “Polly Mellen talked about how she accessorized Natasha Kinski with a Patricia Von Musulin bracelet in a famous Avedon shot. And Diane told me Barry Diller gave her a Band-Aid box of diamonds when he proposed.” Other talks focused on accessories included Christian Louboutin, Thom Browne and his Hectorthe-Dog bag, and Betsey Johnson’s successful licensing business.
Mallis still adorns herself with a lot of jewelry, including a gold band from her friend Robin Jacobsen, who died of AIDS; a Rams Head design to note her Aries zodiac sign and one spelling ‘Goddess’ from her niece, both by Solange Azagury-Partridge. She also wears a citron topaz — which was a gift from her uncle — in a setting by Angela Cummings. Shoulder replacement surgeries have made Mallis a fan of cross-body bags, and she is partial to those by German designer Gabriele Frantzen. “I have it in about ten colors with interchangeable straps; they are embossed with a hashtag or a scarab.” Having given up heels after the pandemic, she prefers flats, and boots, favoring everyone from Manolo Blahnik to Penelope Chilvers, Dee Hilfiger, and Sam Edelman.
After a roof leak caused her bedroom ceiling to collapse, she decided it was time to find a new way to store her necklaces and baubles from India as many were destroyed with the crash. She called upon her pal, the architect Bromley, who installed a peg system for her vast collection. Her motto? “You need to see them, or you won’t wear them.” Spoken like the godmother of New York fashion.