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"  On a recent spring afternoon, the designer makes an entrance into one of the perfectly appointed, light-filled aeries in her Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse that would make most women faint with a covetous sigh. The sitting room, which is wallpapered in striped linen and features an assemblage of damask love seats and 18th-century Jacob armchairs, is an apt environ for the regal Herrera to hold court. At 72, she&amp;#039;s a tidy package, dressed in a crisp white blouse and herringbone trousers--a diminutive, chic figure nestled in a settee, ever prepared with a tiny stack on her lap of elegantly torn scraps of cream stationery she&amp;#039;s written important notes on over the years. &amp;quot;I write everything down,&amp;quot; she says with pin-perfect diction in her lilting yet clipped South American accent. &amp;quot;Things I&amp;#039;ve seen and liked. I have massive amounts of these little notes.&amp;quot; Herrera is undeniably a supremely stylish doyenne whose customs and appearance hail from a time when the idea of shredded Balmain T-shirts was as unimaginable as Snooki&amp;#039;s fiefdom. And yet to distill her essence down to elegant, aristocratic, ladylike, and refined--words as well-worn as one&amp;#039;s grandmother&amp;#039;s pearls--is to sell her short. While her smooth, whipped-butter-blonde coif, flawlessly made-up visage, and signature starched, buttoned-up shirt might read as armor to some, in truth, she&amp;#039;s a veritable good-time girl. Herrera&amp;#039;s closest friends are happy to unravel the myth, referencing her wicked sense of humor and mischievous streak, which have far outlasted her halcyon days at Studio 54. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s so open to everything, and she&amp;#039;s very ladylike, but that&amp;#039;s not the only way I&amp;#039;d describe her,&amp;quot; says Lynn Wyatt, the last of the great society swans. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s a lady, but she&amp;#039;s a woman through and through.&amp;quot; Longtime friend Calvin Klein concurs, &amp;quot;Carolina herself is the embodiment of the Herrera woman: refinement, sophistication, modern, glamorous, romantic--and always in the best taste. ... But Carolina is not at all grand and can be very funny. In a friend&amp;#039;s box at the Metropolitan Opera, during the performance, a woman asked, &amp;#039;Do you have a nail file?&amp;#039; Carolina replied, in a perfect deadpan manner, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m a seamstress, not a manicurist.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; The Venezuelan-born beauty, who cut a wide and glorious taffeta swath through New York society in the &amp;#039;70s, alongside her dapper husband, Reinaldo, never let her upper-crust roots impinge on her choice of friends or her sense of adventure. She was as at ease dining with Princess Margaret as she was frequenting Manhattan hot spots with Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.  As Herrera conjures memories of her past, her elegant cursive scribbles come in handy. While she doesn&amp;#039;t recall being particularly enamored of fashion as a young girl, given her privileged upbringing (her father was an aviation pioneer as well as the governor of Caracas, while her mother often traveled to Paris to visit the designer ateliers), it&amp;#039;s amusing to note that her greatest influencers, other than her parents, were her horse&amp;#039;s groom, her tennis pro, and her riding instructor--all of whom she saw daily. &amp;quot;They were my mentors because I was more interested in that life than in fashion,&amp;quot; says Herrera. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not going to tell you that I was making little dresses for dolls, because I wasn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot;  It wasn&amp;#039;t until later in her teens that she started taking note of glamorous film stars of the &amp;#039;50s and emulating their style. &amp;quot;I wanted to be a vamp with a cigarette holder and a hat with a veil and dress all in black.&amp;quot; It was her inimitable fashion sense, charm, and old-world looks that drove her later success. Though she married at 18, had two daughters (Mercedes and Ana Luisa), and divorced soon after, it was her second marriage, to social maestro and childhood friend Reinaldo Herrera in 1968, that ultimately altered the course of her life.   The dashing couple led a very cosmopolitan life, between Caracas and New York and travels to far-flung locales. &amp;quot;I met Carolina when they first came here,&amp;quot; says the venerable Aileen Mehle, the former society chronicler for Women&amp;#039;s Wear Daily and W magazine who penned the infamous Suzy column. &amp;quot;I can remember what she looked like. I can remember the dress she wore. We used to go to the same dinner parties. She was so lovely looking. At a dinner at Kitty Miller&amp;#039;s (the famed New York, Palm Beach, and London social), she had curly blonde hair, almost in ringlets, and was wearing a beautiful white lace dress. She looked like some kind of a glorious doll.&amp;quot; Herrera soon found herself running around with the kings of nightlife. &amp;quot;Andy [Warhol] and I used to see each other all the time with Bianca [Jagger] then,&amp;quot; she recalls. &amp;quot;When he did my painting, I went to his Factory, and he took 40 or 60 Polaroids.&amp;quot; The finished piece now hangs upstairs and features a very serious Carolina circa 1979, with high-gloss red lips, opulent blue eyeshadow, and mythically sized earrings, capturing an imperiousness offset by his poppy use of color. &amp;quot;He was quiet, but he did say key things in a very funny way,&amp;quot; says Herrera. &amp;quot;Andy seemed to be very timid, shy, but he liked being very successful. I remember when he wanted to be a fashion model. He was cast in a Halston show. Bianca and I were in the audience, and when Andy walked in and saw us there, instead of going backstage, he stopped and said hello to all of us. That was the end of that.&amp;quot;  One of her other nearest and dearest friends was Robert Mapplethorpe, whom she met on a flight to Mustique in 1976. A hauntingly beautiful portrait he took of her on the island still hangs in a position of prominence in her office. &amp;quot;He would say, &amp;#039;You have to let me photograph you,&amp;#039; and I would say, &amp;#039;Why?&amp;#039; And he said, &amp;#039;Because I&amp;#039;m going to be so famous, and you&amp;#039;re going to be so mad you didn&amp;#039;t!&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  He captured her in several iconic photos, from the soft to the severe. Her eyes belie a vulnerability that her glamour masks. &amp;quot;An aunt of mine bought a book of Robert&amp;#039;s and said, &amp;#039;You know you are in a pornographic book. You&amp;#039;re sitting there with a hat and a veil very proper, but everybody else is naked.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;He did one before he died,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;He said, &amp;#039;Come, I need to do one before I go.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  In the midst of those heady days, Herrera had two more daughters (Carolina and Patricia), and as the flash and cash of the &amp;#039;80s descended, she realized she wanted to do something different with her life. &amp;quot;I went to Diana Vreeland and said, &amp;#039;You know what? I&amp;#039;m going to design fabrics.&amp;#039; And she said, &amp;#039;Oh, that&amp;#039;s so boring. Why don&amp;#039;t you do something else? Why don&amp;#039;t you do a collection of dresses? It&amp;#039;s much more fun.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  At the urging of Vreeland, along with fashion aristos Count Rudi Crespi and his wife, Consuelo, Herrera designed a collection in 1981 and held a show at the exclusive Metropolitan Club. &amp;quot;They never had a show there before mine,&amp;quot; says Herrera with a laugh. &amp;quot;It was a madhouse. I had live music, a pianist playing Cole Porter songs. I thought it was divine, but there were many problems. Some of the models&amp;#039; looks weren&amp;#039;t even finished. Iman&amp;#039;s hem wasn&amp;#039;t done, so we had to use pins, but she was so happy to work with the pins, and she looked fabulous.&amp;quot; Mehle recalls Herrera&amp;#039;s behind-the-scenes reaction, when her nerves got the best of her epic reserve. &amp;quot;She cried a lot after her first show, and it was very well accepted, but it took so much of her, and she was so new to the game. I remember Reinaldo saying, &amp;#039;She has to stop crying. She should not cry.&amp;#039; She was just a little baby in this work, and she&amp;#039;d done so well right out of the box.&amp;quot; That was just the beginning of Herrera&amp;#039;s design career. Not only was the line scooped up by Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue, but Jackie O. began wearing Herrera&amp;#039;s fashions regularly. &amp;quot;When I started, she came to me, and I dressed her a lot for those last years,&amp;quot; says Herrera. &amp;quot;It was fun to have her there and a great inspiration. She was so natural and knew exactly what she wanted and what looked good on her.&amp;quot; The two ladies shared many qualities--iconic style, a sophisticated mien, and a reluctance for self-promotion. &amp;quot;Jackie had a great sense of history and responsibility for what and who she was. She said, &amp;#039;I am nothing. He was the president. I was only the first lady, so I don&amp;#039;t have anything to say.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; And even though she spent the rest of her life being continually tailed by paparazzi, she managed them with a coolness modern-day celebs can only aspire to.  &amp;quot;Jackie ignored them. She didn&amp;#039;t fight; she didn&amp;#039;t do anything. She always said you have to go on with your life and pretend they aren&amp;#039;t there. But when you see her photographs, in all of them, she still looks fabulous.&amp;quot; Despite Herrera&amp;#039;s success, she&amp;#039;s managed to keep her career separate from her home life. &amp;quot;When she went in the business and started to become a big great success, she never talked about it,&amp;quot; says Wyatt. &amp;quot;You would never think that she&amp;#039;s this great designer, even today. She is capable of pigeonholing that part of her life, which is a goodly amount of her life obviously, where it doesn&amp;#039;t cross over with her social life or her friends or her husband or children, and to me that is remarkable.&amp;quot; Now 30 years into her career, she&amp;#039;s also cultivated an eponymous label of elegant classics into a separate lifestyle brand called CH Carolina Herrera. With more than 70 stores worldwide, Herrera is extending her manicured reach across the globe.  &amp;quot;The way she is as a person reflects directly into her brand,&amp;quot; says friend, fan, and fellow designer Donna Karan. &amp;quot;As a woman, she&amp;#039;s humorous, supportive, gracious, stylish, and dignified, and she communicates all this to her customer.&amp;quot; Clearly, it is Herrera&amp;#039;s rich personal life that has paved the gilded way to her success. Her incredible sense of self, her family, and her marriage, above all, have given rise to her \u00E9clat yet ultimately kept her wonderfully grounded. &amp;quot;Back in the good old days, when we used to go to the Buckleys, before the Buckleys were gone, we used to laugh and scream and carry on,&amp;quot; says Mehle. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the way Carolina and Reinaldo are; they&amp;#039;re laughers and screamers and carry-oners. To me, Carolina has always seemed the woman that has it all. And deservedly so,&amp;quot; says Mehle. &amp;quot;She is the divinest of the divine.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/designers/a726/carolina-herrera-interview/>