By Ellen Wulfhorst
New York - Having a dream come true can be scary.
Just ask Sebastian Pons, one of the highly anticipated young designers showing his first-ever collection in the semi-annual fashion week in New York.
Nine months spent creating designs, learning to embroider in India, lining up manufacturers and working 19 hours a day on the final presentation boil down to just 15, maybe 17, minutes on a runway on Friday before the most critical eyes in the industry.
| 'Of course it's scary, but what isn't scary today?' |
"Of course it's scary, but what isn't scary today?" the exuberant 31-year-old designer said this week. "I've always dreamed about doing this in this city, and now its my time. I don't want to be scared. I want to be excited and happy. This is my dream come true.
"It's scary, but I'm very excited," he concluded.
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But the Majorcan-born Pons is no newcomer to fashion. Not only does he say he was making fashion drawings for his mother as a child, but he spent many years working for fashion powerhouses - the iconoclastic fellow Majorcan Miguel Adrover and the English master of spectacle Alexander McQueen.
"Pons has a lot of promise with his background," said Robert Janjigian, fashion editor of the Palm Beach Daily News, the hometown paper to many of the socialites who fill the seats at fashion week. "He has great credentials."
The Independent of London has credited Pons with "visceral inventiveness," "doe-eyed charm" and "convincing enthusiasm".
"Next summer, if all goes well, Sebastian Pons' customers will be congratulating themselves on having sought out a hot new European fashion label," The Independent wrote this month.
Pons isn't starting small. The theme of his show, he said, is "the odyssey of my life."
"The history of mankind, the history of art, anthropology, philosophy, literature - I can translate all these things that I like into clothes," Pons said.
For inspiration, he looked back in time - way back.
"It seems like designers always get stuck, in the 1950s, the '60s, bit of '80s, so instead of doing that, I said why don't we go back 6 000 years ago to Greece and Rome? The foundations of those cultures are still very alive in our culture today - the sense of beauty and elegance and philosophy and art."
Pons' collection starts with the tunic and the chiton, a basic and easily recognizable form consisting of two rectangles of material held together with clips at the shoulder and hanging straight down the body.
"It's the most simple thing ever, and it just works so beautifully on a woman's body. It's like, why hadn't I thought of that before?" he said. "It's how everything started in the history of clothing."
Key to the new designer's fate this week is not only capturing the attention of the fashion media but winning over the buyers he hopes will put his clothes in their shops. So far he is not selling anything in the United States.
"I don't expect an instant success. For me, the success is going to be at a slow pace," he said. "It's not just about getting the cover on a magazine and the big front page in the newspaper. It's about building the business behind it all and the structure of the company."
But he's so optimistic he's already designed the looks for his next show, set for February.
"I'm not tired. I love this. This is my passion. This is my life. It's not my religion, fashion, but it's close to it," he said.
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