As nominated by the Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week during the Barcelona Bridal & Fashion Awards night, Vera Wang is receiving honorary recognition bestowed upon individuals who have demonstrated a significant and lasting impact in their field throughout their career In the case of Vera Wang, this award acknowledges her outstanding contributions and remarkable achievements in the bridal industry throughout her professional lifetime.
Let's deep dive into the collaboration between the designer and Pronovias:
1. Who is the VERA WANG BRIDE ?
“I cannot express enough just (how much) the Vera Wang Bride adores fashion and from the very start, I approached bridal as a fashion veteran/insider. So, as a designer, I also brought that unique freedom, experience, confidence, and exposure to my work. I have always maintained that I was a fashion designer who happens to create bridal, not a bridal designer per se. Vera Wang Bride has always been about a girl who is fearless, adores fashion, and has her own sense of self! The gowns bring a certain charm, sensuality, artistry, and/or grandeur, depending upon the bride and the dress, all descriptive infused into our DNA and a way for the Vera Wang Bride to have a sense of individuality.”
2. What is it in your collaboration with Pronovias that changes bridal for you?
“Pronovias Group is one of the most respected and successful bridal companies in the world with a huge international reach, both in terms of brick + mortar retail as well as over 4000 plus wholesale accounts. For us, that equates to giving us the opportunity to reach a whole other audience from every perspective with an extraordinary quality (unduplicatable) at an amazing price point. With Pronovias I can bring the aesthetic of who I am. From the first collection, it was a very big surprise to see the quality and inherent value. It was very heartening for me because, for so many years of being in Haute couture, it was so nice to see gowns so well made at an attainable price point. The desire, care, energy, and involvement that Amandine and Pronovias bring to the collaboration.”
3. What does working with a brand like Pronovias bring to Vera Wang?
“I think it means a great deal. With Vera Wang Bride I can reach more brides globally and at a much more accessible and wonderful price point. But with Pronovias they have really been able to capture the brides who love our designs and our style but didn’t have the accessibility to our product, and now we can offer this through Vera Wang Bride. It’s not inexpensive but it’s more attainable than haute. It reaches a wide range of brides that I could not reach otherwise globally without this partnership.”
4. How is Vera Wang Bride different from Vera Wang Haute?
“Haute will always be extremely experimental and push the fashion boundaries (Without regard to sales volume or design parameters), but it plays to a different, more limited audience where Vera Wang Bride has given us the opportunity to expand our bridal reach in a more attainable price point.”
5. What are the main differences between designing for a bride and designing a ready-to-wear look?
“When I design bridal, I am bridal oriented, asking myself who is this girl? What is she looking for? We are always trying to tell a story in that season, and I never like to repeat. When I do my own r-t-w collection it's more about me and how I would dress myself. So, the intention is totally different, one being bridal-centric and herself and the other is me and my own sense of style where you are bringing your own ideas and concepts that are personal. In bridal, the influencer really needs to come from the brides themselves. When a bride comes to see Vera Wang Bride, I want it to have the same taste level, sophistication, creativity, and the same quality as r-t-w, but it’s very much geared towards the bride.”
6. What is the biggest change you have noticed in bridal trends since you started your fashion brand until today?
“It’s been 35 years. I will be honest; I think we created many of these trends. This is because of my background. I don’t come from the bridal industry, although we form a lot of it now. I come from a fashion background and that’s really what we brought to bridal. For the last 35 years we have really tried to constantly evolve the choices and the vision and to appeal to a wide range of women, all of whom I encourage to embrace fashion more on their wedding day. We have brought in black, colors, hand paintings and lace development with special laces woven, and we have established so many trends through this. There was a moment where lace wasn’t even important in bridal, and it’s extremely important today. Really in all fairness we constantly push the design envelope in bridal.”
7. As an industry veteran, how have you stayed connected to your brides?
“I think because we do r-t-w, red-carpet, Hollywood, and you can’t help being influenced by a certain feeling of those around you as a designer. It is about being connected and how you can change things up whether it is in r-t-w or bridal, and sometimes they cross pollinate.”
8. What trends are you loving in the bridal fashion industry now?
“There is a very distinct love of traditional and classic lace, whether it is partial or completely covering, and it has been a large trend over the last 10 years. When I started, people associated lace with being too traditional. What we have done now is find a new way of interpreting an old concept, bringing it forward for the modern-day bride. The use of lace has more than resurfaced, its back. The other trend, which is on the other end, is the modern and sleek minimalism design with the dresses. There is a focus on the architectural silhouette and less detailed in decorative ornamentation, which we see is very much happening in bridal right now.”
9. How do you balance creativity and functionality in your designs to meet the diverse lifestyles of women today?
“If I am involved directly in the wedding and I am with the bride, hopefully I can bring a different perspective, but at the same time being in bridal, is a very different job than r-t-w. When I design r-t-w it is very much about me, what I envision and the sensuality. Where when I design bridal, I am more of a costumer, I want to provide every range for the bride whether she wants minimalist or extremely over the top. To dress a bride, I want to offer the most possibility to a bride regardless of her personal style and her wedding style. I want every bride to be able to relate in some sense herself to the collection. This is why I do different collections in every season, and you will never find I follow exactly what I did the year before.”
10. Looking back over your long career, is there a moment or trend that has stayed most in your heart? And among the celebrities who have married into Vera Wang, who are you most proud of?
“Now being honored by the CFDA last year, looking back at my old campaigns and editorial and the body of work that has been completed, its staggering. We really brought fashion to bridal, and before that one can look through old magazines, it was quite formulaic, and we have taken the f from formulaic and put it in fashion. We put black in wedding gowns, and that influence was honestly from lingerie, and reflective of women loving black or nude, so why not make it into a gown. Then my collections of reds and shades of pink was influenced by the Asian market. I am a sittings editor, and I can’t help but take that creativity and mind-set to design.