Yigal Azrouël | Photo: Claiborne Swanson Frank

NEW YORK, United States — “For me it’s all about longevity,” says designer Yigal Azrouël. “You see a lot of brands out there becoming stars over night. And then they disappear. I am building it slowly, slowly. It’s much deeper. It’s much stronger.”

Growing up in Israel, where he would later work occasionally as a stylist, the young Azrouël believed his prospects of becoming a fashion designer nigh on impossible. But when he came to New York to visit his sister he was immediately seduced by the romance of fashion. “I was dreaming about it,” he says. “I wanted to be part of it all, this glamorous world. I had a fantasy of it.”

And it is with the determination of a fantasist who doesn’t care to awake from his dream that Azrouël has built his company on firm footing, reinforcing it every step of the way.

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Victoria Bartlett | Source: VPL

NEW YORK, United States — “It was almost like an experiment,” says Victoria Bartlett, of starting her much-loved underwear-as-outerwear line VPL in 2003. “I felt like a scientist going in and I really didn’t know how it was going to go.” Seven years on, with a CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund nomination (2007) under her belt and a recently opened retail presence in New York’s SoHo, we can fairly say that the experiment has been a success.

The road that got her there is paved in equal parts with Bartlett’s adventurousness and the shrewd discipline that has proved a boon for her line. Fresh from the London College of Fashion, in the late ‘80s the British-born Bartlett launched a line called BC, which, as she says, “failed because I was too green and too young.” So the young designer went in search of other avenues to pursue her love of fashion. “I took a sabbatical and decided to take a venture into styling,” she says, “which wasn’t as prevalent as it is now.”

She still speaks passionately about the tools she learned working as a stylist, and the way they inform her life and work now. “You learn how to create clothes,” she says. “A lot of designers (I know from consulting for them for years) get very tunnel-visioned — they start with a skirt or they start items and they don’t know how it all goes together.”

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NEW YORK, United States — “I want to own this whole thing,” Philip Crangi says of his popular jewellery brand. “I’d rather own 100 percent of something small that 10 percent of something huge.” The 2008 CFDA Swarovski Award for Accessories winner — whose jewellery is both intensely popular with editors and intensely personal to those who wear it — takes as much pride in forging his business as he does each golden amulet. “It’s more than a job,” he says. “It’s my baby. I want control over it. I believe in control.”

Growing up in Boca Raton, Florida, Crangi developed a fascination with the talismanic nature of jewellery, charms and trinkets. “I wanted to find the buried treasure in flea markets or in the attic,” he says. “I never did, so I have to make it myself.”

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Viktor and Rolf | Photo: Philip Riches

NEW YORK, United States — “We had big ambitions,” says Viktor Horsting on creating fashion house Viktor & Rolf with Rolf Snoeren. “From the very beginning we wanted to start very high,” he says, indicating the absolute apogee of couture elegance: “Start at the top, and everything else would fall into place after that. It was a very emotional ambition, not just in terms of the size of the business or wanting to be like a certain designer. It was more about fulfilling creative ambitions and working at the highest level possible.”

In 1993, the duo, known for their immaculate constructions and the pop-sensationalism of their shows, gave the world a glimpse of their aims with an underground presentation of their first collection in Paris, which won them the venerated Grand Prix de la Ville de Hyères. Seventeen years and nearly 50 collections later, Viktor & Rolf’s dramatic vision has itself become a sensation — the awards continue to roll in and in 2008, around the time both of the designers were celebrating their fortieth birthdays, their work was the subject of a retrospective at London’s esteemed Barbican Gallery.

Today, as they celebrate the five year anniversary of their wildly successful fragrance Flowerbomb with a rare trip to New York at the start of fashion week, the elegant gentlemen from the Netherlands say they finally have all the pieces in place to realize their vaulting ambition.

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Scott Sternberg at Lego installation at Opening Ceremony | Source: Selectism

Today, BoF brings you First Person with Band of Outsiders’ Scott Sternberg, followed later this week by the exclusive global debut of a new Band of Outsiders film directed by Debra Scherer for The Little Squares.

LOS ANGELES, United States — What made a 20-something junior agent at CAA, with no background in clothing design, think he could just up and create a fashion company and make it a viable business?

“Good question,” says Scott Sternberg, who in 2004 did just that, ditching his desk job to launch the LA-based Band of Outsiders with a limited collection of shirts and ties. Four years in, Sternberg won the CFDA Swarovski award for emerging menswear designer; last year he shared the top award with Italo Zucchelli of Calvin Klein. This September the hip brand, found at dozens stores around the world, will debut its fourth imprint, the entry-level womenswear line, girl.

Viable indeed. A runaway success, more like it.

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