Two looks from Ovitz's spring 2009 line.
Her adolescence, however, provides the real clues to her line. Ovitz spent her youth riding horses, having taken up the sport at age nine. Thus, the subtle equestrian theme throughout. “I imagine my dresses on a woman riding sidesaddle and bareback,” says Ovitz, who employs two crisscrossed riding crops for her company logo. “I wanted to build a brand around an equestrian American lifestyle.”
Which is not to say the collection looks like a Ralph Lauren redux. Ovitz spins the horsey conceit in her own direction, less Mad Men’s Betty Draper wielding a crop and more Patti Smith making a wrong turn at the ranch. There’s a reason she christened spring’s launch Ladies at the Country House Having a Punk Party and Raiding the Stable. “That one sentence completely defines everything my girl is. She’s punky and edgy,” Ovitz says. “She’s not a sophisticated, stick-up-your-ass kind of girl.”
Modern art is another major influence, accounting for the collection’s clean and simple vibe. And though there’s hardly a designer who hasn’t mined the art world for ideas, how many can say they got the exposure Ovitz did as a kid? The Brentwood Park, California, home in which she grew up was equipped with its own glass-domed art gallery. (“I basically lived in a museum,” she quips.) Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman—Ovitz’s father, a serious collector who sits on the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has them all, and more, in his private collection. “My dad’s into minimalist stuff, so my palette and silhouettes…I wanted it all to be very minimal, easy and classic,” she says, noting that Jasper Johns’s White Flag, also owned by her father, is the inspiration for fall 2009. “I was surrounded by all these masters of art every day of my life,” she says. “I feel really fortunate.”
“Fortunate” is a word Ovitz drops often. “Grateful” is another. “I wouldn’t have had the opportunities I had without [my father],” she acknowledges. Not that Ovitz need apologize for having a rich and famous parent. As Rebecca Hoffman, daughter of Dustin, and Ovitz’s close friend since childhood, says: “Everyone in life is going to use whatever you have to get to where you want to be. It’s not something Kim’s comfortable throwing around, but you can’t deny your own birth situation.”
Lisa Tobias, a college friend who works in Gossip Girl’s costume department, notes: “She’s lucky. She’s able to have a line; she’s young and can finance it. But it’s a struggle for her too. She feels she has to prove herself more.”
