Carolina Herrera has taken its shows on the road in recent years, from Madrid and Mexico City to Rio de Janeiro. But for the 45th anniversary of the house Carolina Herrera founded in 1981 as a recent arrival from Caracas, Venezuela, creative director Wes Gordon felt it had to be New York or nowhere. “I approached it as a love letter and a celebration, not only of a house that I revere, and a woman that I revere, but a city that I revere as well,” he said backstage after his spring 2027 show. The setting was Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, home of New York City Ballet, for which Gordon has designed costumes. On the Promenade, he recreated Park Avenue, planting a traffic median of 28,798 yellow tulips between the venue’s monumental Elie Nadelman sculptures. (There were originally 28,800, but Gordon gave two to his children, Henry and Georgia.)
Among the seated guests were Fran Lebowitz and Pamela Anderson, along with designers Tory Burch, Gabriela Hearst, and Conner Ives, while fashion students and the house’s employees packed the balconies to the gilded rafters. “A Herrera show is not a monochromatic army of silhouettes, but rather has enough diversity that any woman can find a piece that looks like her,” Gordon said. Mrs. Herrera, now 87, sat front row wearing a piece of house history: a white shirt from her first show, worn, as she often has for evening, with a ball skirt. That signature piece became a leitmotif on the runway, from a trim version teamed with black cigarette pants to a collared halter dress and floor-sweeping shirtdress styled with a tonal cummerbund-cum-train. Other Herrera signatures were present and accounted for, too, from Herrera Red and ruffles to polka dots in classic black-and-white or black paired with a lovely blue Gordon called Cielo, Spanish for sky.
The runway also featured a cameo by Mrs. Herrera—or rather, her Warhol portrait, reimagined as an embroidered minidress. The tightly cropped canvas, with its sweep of pink eyeshadow, red lips, and emerald earrings, was part of the artist’s 1978–79 series of friends and celebrities like Liza Minnelli and Truman Capote. “When I arrived at Herrera, that Warhol portrait became an answer to me about what the house needs to embrace,” said Gordon, close to a decade into his tenure. “It was color, it was confidence, it was glamour.” Gordon also ventured into high jewelry this season, finding a kindred colorist in Taffin’s James de Givenchy. A cherry-red ceramic-and-gold lip ring, flower-like earrings with jumbo cognac cabochons framed by soft-pink petals, and oversize earrings pairing deep-purple faceted stones with hot-pink bezels worn by closer Karlie Kloss were almost as colorful as the rainbow-beaded bracelet made by Gordon’s son, Henry, which peeked out from his pushed-up sleeve as he took his bow.
