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" Touring the new Reed Krakoff flagship store on Madison Avenue with the designer himself is not exactly like walking through a tropical rainforest with an aboriginal monkey hunter, but there are similarities, namely in the rush of occult detail you would likely never notice without the guidance of a professional eye.  The abstract RK logo of Krakoff&amp;#039;s new brand isn&amp;#039;t hard to spot where it&amp;#039;s been woven into an RK Grey rug, but you might easily miss where it&amp;#039;s been etched into the neck blocks of the dressing dummies or inserted through die-cut leather as the rubber Vibram sole on motocross-inspired boots. &amp;quot;A brand has to start with the clothes and accessories, but it really has to be carried through in every detail,&amp;quot; says Krakoff, so far best known as the $20.8 million-a-year president and executive creative director of the accessories giant Coach, where annual sales increased from around $500 million after he arrived in 1996 to more than $3.75 billion last year. His new self-named venture, launched for last fall, is owned by Coach, where he&amp;#039;s still firmly entrenched. &amp;quot;I still have a job I love at Coach,&amp;quot; he says. To keep the boundaries clear between the two, he has two offices at the Coach headquarters on Manhattan&amp;#039;s far west side. He has two sets of stationery. He writes with two sets of pens.  RK, as Krakoff sometimes calls the line, represents not only the 47-year-old accessories master&amp;#039;s first foray into women&amp;#039;s ready-to-wear, but also his first attempt to build a brand from scratch outside the mold of the company where he made his fortune. He has opened three stores so far\u2014in New York, Las Vegas, and Tokyo\u2014with a fourth coming soon to Short Hills, New Jersey.  As an example of a brand-extending detail, Krakoff points to the gunmetal T-pin closure on the instep strap of a classic ballerina flat from fall 2010. Suddenly the motif is visible everywhere: T-pins on the leather bracelets and vegetable-tanned bridle-leather belts, and on such staples of urbane refinement as the Boxer, a handbag with a wraparound strap that Krakoff says was inspired by the brutally pragmatic way boxers wrap their wrists before fights. RK-branded toggles are subtly insinuated on the hinges of oval-frame sunglasses and appear with no functional purpose at all on the T-Bar necklace, on which an outsize white-powder-coated toggle dangles from a chain like the handle on the pull-cord starter of a suburban lawn mower. Krakoff has a kind of pythons-in-the-city aesthetic that relishes oppositions and paradoxical associations. He&amp;#039;s intrigued by what he calls &amp;quot;subversive luxury,&amp;quot; which means roughing up high-end alligator bags with black wax and industrial zippers on black tape, or offsetting the predatory sheen of python-skin pumps with ultrafeminine d&amp;#039;Orsay-style cutaways that show the arch of a woman&amp;#039;s foot.  For fall, he luxuriously renovated industrial staples: long, boxy coats in army-green moleskin and navy twill, shearling trims, and cashmere henleys, all accented with Machine Age\u2013inspired, heavy-duty chain jewelry. In the store, the Krakoff touch appears in the materials and the details: a sweater of workmanlike wool is stitched with luxe alpaca elbow pads and a delicate label made of organza; his apron dress\u2014a theme he continues to explore\u2014does the utilitarian commonplace of the kitchen in napa saddle leather.  For spring, he let some air and light into his collection, riffing on the contrast of matte versus shine and sheer versus opaque in his fabrics, and opening the show with a parade of head-to-toe white. Oversize camp shirts, a tailored take on painter&amp;#039;s pants, and minimalist utility belts again touched on his pet theme of functionality, but they were blended with airier Japanese elements such as kimono shapes and obi details. Spring&amp;#039;s accessories, not surprisingly, were among the \u00ADcollection&amp;#039;s strongest offerings: tribal-\u00ADflavored, boar-hair-ruffled sandals and matte python &amp;quot;gym bags&amp;quot; with rubberized straps seemed destined for both TriBeCa offices and Upper East Side lunch spots\u2014well suited, one imagines, to someone like Krakoff&amp;#039;s front row guest, Julianne Moore.  &amp;quot;This is not about fashion for me. It&amp;#039;s not about being trendy. It&amp;#039;s about design,&amp;quot; Krakoff says when we sit down on the gray felt couches he designed with his wife, Delphine, who owns the Manhattan interiors firm Pamplemousse Design, Inc. His minimalist instincts are reflected in his outfit, which has been the same for nearly three years: a blue custom jacquard Turnbull &amp;amp;amp; Asser shirt, A.P.C. jeans (waist 33, \u00ADinseam 34), dark socks, and John Lobb shoes. (The female staff in the Madison \u00ADAvenue store wear the RK line; the men, dark suits by Ralph Lauren.)  &amp;quot;American design to me means taking things that have a known code and feeling about them and pushing and pulling them to extremes\u2014imbuing the feminine with the masculine, taking something esoteric and rare and bringing it into the everyday world, or taking something utilitarian and rendering it in something luxurious and sexy,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;The idea is to create unexpected tensions between known attitudes.&amp;quot; Krakoff&amp;#039;s first collection had created some tensions for him with the fashion press\u2014critics called it clunky and heavy, but also seemed to take issue with what they may have thought was the presumptuousness of Krakoff&amp;#039;s ambition and the sin of his having the business savvy and the capital to get it off the ground. Luxury brands don&amp;#039;t customarily emerge overnight with handsome Madison Avenue stores done up with Louis XVI parquet floors and walls lacquered in a bespoke color\u2014RK Grey\u2014not to mention racks laden with ready-to-wear featuring exotic materials, plus bags, shoes, jewelry, branded watches and even perfume in limited-edition Murano glass bottles made by the famous artisans of the Seguso family. Somebody with that kind of backing, the reasoning goes, ought to be proven\u2014indeed preeminent\u2014ready-to-wear talent.  Waving off the the particularly acid estimation of one New York Times writer as standard fashionista snark, Krakoff acknowledges his public learning curve and the perennial truth that you can&amp;#039;t succeed if you&amp;#039;re paralyzed by the fear of failing.  &amp;quot;I think in my first collection and maybe the second, the creativity was on the surface,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It was less confident. I feel much more confident now. But you have to go through that scary part where you don&amp;#039;t necessarily know what you are doing. If you&amp;#039;re competent at something like business, people want to pigeonhole you. There&amp;#039;s no reason why someone can&amp;#039;t be a commercial designer and run a broad-based brand, and also create something luxurious and rarefied. That&amp;#039;s my ultimate goal.&amp;quot;  RK may be too new to define exactly its archetypal customer, though Krakoff obviously has some ideas. He photographed the brand&amp;#039;s first ad campaign on Stella Tennant: a tall British bird slouching in hot shoes in what could be the boho townhouse of a London intellectual with a lot of family money. &amp;quot;The woman I&amp;#039;m designing for is very natural, very engaged in the world,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;She exudes confidence. She pays attention to the way things look and feel and perform. She has elevated and refined taste, but she never telegraphs it in obvious ways.&amp;quot; Of course, archetypes can be refocused in less time than it takes to run a credit card. The afternoon I was in the store, a woman arrived from Greenwich, Connecticut; while her Town Car idled out front, she purchased $35,000 worth of dresses, bags, and shoes. In a sense, one of Krakoff&amp;#039;s most para\u00ADdoxical creations is himself. It&amp;#039;s not easy to square the aesthete who has published monographs on the Israeli industrial designer Ron Arad and the French sculptors Claude and Fran\u00E7ois-Xavier Lalanne with the photographer who did a book of portraits of the bullet-headed men who \u00ADcompete in the Ultimate Fighting Cham\u00ADp\u00ADionship. Or to reconcile the two-time winner of the Council of Fashion Designers of America Accessory Designer of the Year award with the suburban kid who was avid for hockey. Krakoff today is one of the most prominent art and design collectors in New York City. He has a refined sensibility, but maintains that &amp;quot;too much good taste is boring.&amp;quot; He and Delphine live in Manhattan across the street from Woody Allen in a $17 million townhouse with their three young children, Maude, Lily, and Oscar, plus his teenage daughter, Sophie, from his first marriage. The townhouse, which the Krakoffs completely gutted and rebuilt, is a design palace filled with Pucci rugs, Tiffany lamps, a Marc Newson lounge, a Lalanne crocodile chair, a Calder mobile, Line Vautrin mirrors, and paintings by Robert Motherwell and Frank Stella, among other things. In conversation, Krakoff has a studied, watchful poise and neutral manner consonant with his minimalist instincts and his enthusiasm for colors like RK Grey. He keeps his head closely shaved, and his most prominent facial feature is a pair of chunky black-frame glasses. He grew up in Weston, Connecticut, the youngest of three kids whose parents were both originally from Pittsburgh. His father, Bob, who had made a little money as a pool hustler in high school and graduated from Penn State and Harvard Business School, worked for many years as the chairman of Cahners Publishing. Copies of Interior Design magazine, owned by Cahners, were never in short supply at the Krakoff house. Reed&amp;#039;s mother, Sandra, was an interior decorator who often took him along on shopping trips to New York City and helped awaken his early interest in the paintings of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.       Sandra Krakoff recalls entering one of Reed&amp;#039;s paintings in a local art show in 1972, when the family briefly relocated to Weston, Massachusetts. &amp;quot;It was a stencil of lots of numbers, like very early Robert Indiana,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It won second prize, but when they learned Reed was only eight years old, they withdrew the prize. They were not very happy.&amp;quot; As a teenager, Krakoff worked summer jobs in sporting-goods shops, stringing tennis rackets and mounting ski bindings. He cleaned swimming pools. He caddied at Aspetuck Valley Country Club, where his parents were members. He also went off to hockey camp in Canada, harboring dreams of becoming a professional goalie. He played in youth league games all around New England and at a tournament in Sweden, where he won the outstanding player award. If, as he says, fashion criticism doesn&amp;#039;t bother him too much, maybe it&amp;#039;s because he spent so many formative hours with skaters firing pucks at his face. He wore a fiberglass face mask made by the legendary surfboard and hockey-mask maker Ernie Higgins; a few years ago, his mother dug it up, had it mounted in a Lucite box, and gave it to him as a present. In 1982, he headed to Tufts University outside of Boston. He was a decent jazz guitarist, but after listening to his roommate rip off note-for-note renditions of the solos on Jeff Beck&amp;#039;s album Wired, Krakoff knew his future was not in music any more than it had been in hockey. Increasingly, he was intrigued by the possibilities of design. In 1983, his mother suggested they drive into New York for a day and see the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. &amp;quot;I was amazed by the dresses that were inspired by Mondrian and Matisse and Picasso,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;The whole exhibit was an amazing synthesis of design and fashion and business.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Reed was always sketching,&amp;quot; his mother says. &amp;quot;But his interests were very classic. He sketched a lot of John Singer Sargent paintings. They weren&amp;#039;t wonderful sketches\u2014he was never an artist, he was a designer.&amp;quot; After graduating with a degree in art history and economics, he went to Italy for three months to sketch and study Italian. &amp;quot;When he came back, he announced he wanted to be a fashion designer,&amp;quot; his \u00ADmother recalls. &amp;quot;His father said, `Well, what do you need to do to be successful at that?&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I need to go to the Parsons School of \u00ADDesign,&amp;quot; he replied. &amp;quot;Fashion embodied design, the art world, business, travel, sexiness,&amp;quot; says Krakoff. &amp;quot;I was always interested in all kinds of design\u2014but I was never pure enough in one thing to pursue it.&amp;quot; Krakoff&amp;#039;s first job after graduating from Parsons in 1987 was interning at Anne Klein. Among the designers there at the time was Narciso Rodriguez. &amp;quot;He was really serious and really curious,&amp;quot; Rodriguez recalls. &amp;quot;He was keen to see \u00ADeveryone at work\u2014what they were designing and what their process was.&amp;quot; In 1988, Krakoff went to work for Ralph Lauren at Polo, where he spent four years as a senior designer. From both Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, where he started as head designer in April 1992, Krakoff got an education in the nature of brands: how they&amp;#039;re established, how people form opinions about them, how they thrive or wither. &amp;quot;Brands are like people,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re all different, and you get to know them in different ways.&amp;quot; He eventually became senior vice president of marketing, design, and communications at Hilfiger. &amp;quot;I was basically Tommy&amp;#039;s right-hand guy. I launched license categories. I was in on every photo shoot and styled every picture,&amp;quot; Krakoff says. But he and Hilfiger disagreed about the direction of the company, and in late 1996 he was fired. &amp;quot;I \u00ADwanted to develop the brand rather than go for a short-term win,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Looking back, I think everyone needs to get fired once. I&amp;#039;ll never take work for granted again.&amp;quot;  After Hilfiger, he worked briefly in Italy as the creative director of Trussardi, and then he got a call from Lew Frankfort, chairman and chief executive officer of Coach. Frankfort helped oversee the growth of Coach since 1979, when the company had about $6 million in sales. When Krakoff came on board as a senior vice president and executive creative director, he was 32 years old.  &amp;quot;A lot was happening in the industry, fashion was shifting toward global crea\u00ADtivity. There was Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton and Tom Ford at Gucci,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;The last chief marketing officer at Coach had come from Harvard Business School. We&amp;#039;d become too predictable, too boring. We all knew it; the sales weren&amp;#039;t good. When I first got to Coach, I tried some things that didn&amp;#039;t work\u2014bags that were too stylized, too edgy, too glossy. But I couldn&amp;#039;t have figured out where to go unless I tried things that didn&amp;#039;t work.&amp;quot; Soon enough, they did. He sketched, he tweaked, he shot countless ad campaigns, and towards the end of 2010, the stock was at an all-time high. &amp;quot;Reed has the rare ability of blending art and commerce,&amp;quot; says an admiring Frankfort.  &amp;quot;I always say my job is to make people a little uncomfortable,&amp;quot; Krakoff says. &amp;quot;I use my own boredom as a gauge. I always want to push things as far as they&amp;#039;ll go. But what I&amp;#039;m doing now at Coach is acting more as a brand architect.&amp;quot; He sees himself as the &amp;quot;brand architect&amp;quot; if Coach, where, despite the additions of watches, outerwear, etc., the core business is still handbags\u2014&amp;quot;We have hundreds now,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But the danger is trying to do everything with Coach, trying to be all things to all people. One of the reasons I wanted to start RK is to see what it feels like to do something totally different. It&amp;#039;s really helped me see what Coach is and where it can go. RK has allowed me to focus on the core of the Coach brand and re-delineate what it is in terms of its Americanness, the breadth of categories it encompasses.&amp;quot;  The RK website bears a picture of a bulletin board showing some of Krakoff&amp;#039;s inspirations: photos of the open mouth of a great white shark, a swath of python skin, a Walker Evans photo book, a book about Dada, an issue of Art + Auction featuring Ron Arad&amp;#039;s stainless steel sculptures, \u00ADJoseph Beuys&amp;#039; art, a pitcher by the 19th century industrial designer Christopher Dresser, images of poetic femininity from photographer Deborah Turbeville\u2014even a picture from his Ultimate Fighting book, which he says epitomizes the idea of &amp;quot;tough, cool, and confident.&amp;quot; What is notably scarce here are picture of clothes, and women wearing them. When it comes to actually working up a dress, Krakoff says process is more important than concept. &amp;quot;Ideas can come from anywhere. It&amp;#039;s not the conception that&amp;#039;s important as much as what you do with it,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;When you start a brand from nothing, it can be paralyzing. You have to pick a lane and stay in it. You just have to get \u00ADstarted. To me, the process is everything. I just start sketching. I&amp;#039;ll sketch during meetings. I sketch in the car when I&amp;#039;m on my way to the office. I&amp;#039;ll sketch stuff I&amp;#039;ve already done, just to get started\u2014anything, just because it gets me going.&amp;quot; Rodriguez recalls discussing RK with Krakoff before the brand&amp;#039;s launch. &amp;quot;He told me what he planned to do. He had analyzed everything. You could see how much thought had gone into it,&amp;quot; Rodriguez says. &amp;quot;He went through every aspect, detail by detail, from the packaging right down to his vision for the fragrance\u2014the bottle, the \u00ADessence. He had thought it all out so thoroughly.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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