Not many people in Nepal know who Prabal Gurung is. More importantly, even the ones who have heard his name in passing may not know what it is that he does, exactly. Prabal doesn’t mind. He is humble and accepts that the road he is walking on has long ways to go still. At $300 for a simple top, to $10,000 plus for dresses and gowns, that haute couture road doesn’t really run through Kathmandu, Nepal in any case.
In short, Prabal is the Creative Director & CEO of his self-titled New York based fashion line Prabal Gurung. He is a rising star in the fashion industry in the fashion capital of the world. His brand, less than a year old, already sell alongside iconic fashion houses like Oscar De La Renta, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino, in luxury stores like Bloomingdales (New York and South Coast Plaza) and DNA (Riydah) amongst others, while his Spring 2010 collection is going to be available in more outlets of this category.
“Nothing in life is just coincidence,” Prabal insists, sitting inside a café on a cool fall evening in New York’s Lower East Side. It is easy to see why he feels so strongly about it; to him he is a living testament. Establishing a high-end fashion house in New York is no easy feat by any means. “And it may only look simple because I enjoy doing it so much,” he explains. Agreed.
When asked to explain what the New York Times review meant when they noted the ‘tailoring’ in his first season (February 2009), Prabal happily launches into a fairly complex explanation that involves meticulous mathematical equations which would basically result in a product that could elicit the kind of observation The Times made. Neither his level of enthusiasm nor the technical facet of his answers waver when asked about the ‘draping’ The Times complimented in review of his Spring 2010 collection, or about how luxury brands price their products.
Inside this jeans, t-shirt and sneakers wearing young designer with a laid back persona is also a geeky accountant and a perfectionist relentlessly working towards a dream.
The Cautionary Tale
“I was a cautionary tale in Kathmandu,” Prabal says, somewhat still amused. Not hard to imagine: after all, he was a young man in a high school in Nepal in the 1990s who wanted to grow up to be a fashion designer and loved to party.
“But I always knew what I wanted to do.”
Still, even in his late adolescent years, Prabal had been questioned about his ‘life plans.’ At one social gathering in Nepal, someone asked him what he “really” wanted to do with his life, and not just this “hobby” of his.
Does he feel vindicated now?
“It doesn’t even matter.”
It doesn’t.
For Nepalis, it is a natural tendency to immediately look at Prabal, or any one who achieves success and happens to be of Nepali heritage, in a purely Nepali context. On top of that, with Prabal, not only is he the only Nepali to achieve this level of success, but also this kind of success.
Still, Prabal is not a Nepali designer. He is a designer who happens to be Nepali. His success did not stem out of his nationality, rather his nationality only became relevant to Nepalis precisely because of what he has achieved professionally.
What Prabal is, is a world-class designer with an astute sense of business. He has ambitions and plans out how he hopes to achieve them, and while he is very careful he is not scared to make mistakes.
“I knew going to New York could have easily been a mistake,” he recalls of the time when he decided he would leave his career in India and go to the prestigious Parsons school for design at The New School University in New York. “But it would have been my mistake and I could live with that.”
At the time, he had already studied at New Delhi’s National Institute of Fashion Technology, and worked on major design projects in India, traveling to other countries for work. When he met the famous Delhi-based Indian designer Manish Arora, he had hoped to intern with him but ended up taking up a job offer.
“I could have launched my own brand in India at that time, but I knew it wasn’t the kind of designing work I wanted to do,” he adds. Parsons, he knew, could eventually enable him to do the kind of designing work that he did want to do.
The Rise of the Intern
In New York, landing an internship can be a brutally fierce competition between fashion students from the city’s friendly rival fashion schools — Parsons and Fashion Institute of Technology. Prabal won one such competition almost immediately after starting at Parsons in 1999. He meticulously packaged his application and included everything he thought would give him an edge over other applicants– he wasn’t taking chances because Donna Karan wanted only one intern. “Internship is a very important and humbling experience,” he adds, still pleased with his own experiences. When his internship ended, they gave him several boxes full of fabrics as a parting gift.
“These were the best possible fabrics around, expensive stuff, and I used them all the way up to my final designs at Parsons,” he explains.
At Parsons, Prabal excelled in all classes. The school website’s alumni page proudly lists: “Prabal Gurung, 2000, AAS Fashion Design. Named best designer in the Fusion show his senior year, he joined Cynthia Rowley’s design house at her request.”
Soon enough, he was Design Director at the legendary American fashion house, Bill Blass. When they shut down in December 2008, Prabal was well into his next move.
Prabal Gurung, The Brand
“I knew that 2009 was the year I wanted to launch my line. In my head that had been the plan all along,” the designer explains. It is pointless to guess otherwise. In February 2009 — two months after Bill Blass closed — Prabal launched his line — Prabal Gurung, at the New York Fashion Week. Fashion critics loved his collection.
On April 30 earlier this year, actresses Demi Moore and Rachel Weisz both wore a Prabal Gurung dress each to the Cartier 100th Anniversary in America Celebration at Cartier Fifth Avenue Mansion, New York.
In June, Demi Moore wore yet another Prabal Gurung dress, this time in Paris for the launch of her fragrance Wanted. On her twitter page, she wrote “wonderful young designer to look out for Prabal Gurung!”
Prabal Gurung showed its Spring 2010 collection on the first day of the New York Fashion Week, on September 10 last month. When Women’s Wear Daily asked him what his plans were for after the Fashion Week, he was quoted as saying “to sell a lot.” Looks like things are going his way in that department — a feat on its own considering the fact that on many occasions, designers show for two seasons or more and still fail to secure distributors.
The Product of Love (and Planning)
The Fashion industry, a multi-billion dollar money machine, is just that – a money machine. Yet, when Prabal finally decided to launch his line in Spring 2009, he could call up people he had known and worked with over the years and “without any question” they joined his team.
Goodwill, however, isn’t the only thing Prabal saved up on during his years in New York. Prabal Gurung, the high-couture fashion line, was completely funded by its namesake founder’s own earnings.
“I am a product of the love and support of the industry,” Prabal says. “They were all waiting for me to do this, they knew I would, and that I could,” he explains of industry insiders who have been familiar with his work for a long time.
His pressures of his position in the industry today do not seem to burden Prabal. Nor does he seem particularly worried about the process to reach his bigger dreams.
For a young man who is just in the first year of his own fashion line that every major fashion and luxury publication (Harper’s, Vogue, Elle, Style to name a few) from New York to Milan and London to Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong wants to write about, he is relaxed with a sense of being in control of the situation. He isn’t, however, over confident.
“Look this is New York, it’s the fashion world,” he explains sipping through a straw a canned coke poured into a glass half filled with ice cubes. “There have been tons of designers who come in for a season or two, and then disappear. All this can go as fast as it comes.”
Ref: http://beacononline.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/face-in-the-crowd-prabal-gurung-in-the-fashion-world/
