Interview

    It's hard to know exactly when a young designer has crossed the line from being a sensation to becoming a major force. But for the last half of the 2000s-a decade that proposed a wide variety of talented fresh-faced prospective heirs apparent to the fashion world-one name was mentioned with startling frequency. Alexander Wang, born in San Francisco, moved to New York City in 2002 to attend fashion school at Parsons, but he quickly became the -ultimate example of how far a lot of talent and a little experimentalism can go.

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Wang began his eponymous label in 2004 at the age of 19, and his business is still a family affair. (His brother, Dennis, serves as chief financial advisor; his sister-in-law, Aimie, is the chief principal officer; and his mother is also involved.) People quickly fell not only for Wang's luxury refinement and clean silhouettes but, more importantly, for his ability to bring a youthful sensibility so playfully and flippantly into his pieces-as if an Alexander Wang girl could shop high-end and still get out of bed looking good in the clothes she had on the night before. He's a master of the casual, the radical, and the more relaxed (and that's what he can do with cashmere alone). Anna Wintour was one early supporter, and after Wang won the coveted Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund Award in 2008, Diane von Furstenberg became his mentor. In New York circles, there is a sense that Wang, now 26, is at the nucleus of a cluster of hot, pretty girls like Dree Hemingway, Erin Wasson, and Alice Dellal, who all wear his clothes and remain perpetually in his orbit. As Wang prepared for his fall/winter 2010 show, he took a break to reconnect with von Furstenberg, a designer who knows a little something about rising fast and staying on top.

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG: Hi, darling. The first thing we should talk about is our first conversation years ago. Remember?

ALEXANDER WANG: Yeah.

VON FURSTENBERG: I called you. I saw somebody wearing this amazing outdoor sweater with a manifesto on it. I asked the woman wearing it-she was an editor at Vogue-who had made it, and she said, "Alex Wang." That's when I asked you if you'd be willing to design some sweaters for me.

WANG: [laughs] Yes, I remember our first meeting.

VON FURSTENBERG: And then you rejected me.

WANG: [laughs] I knew you were going to say that!

VON FURSTENBERG: People don't reject me, so I remember that.

WANG: I never got a chance to really explain what happened. It was the season that I actually started the line and that sweater you saw was the first prototype we ever made-it's the reverse intarsia with the girl's face on the back. At that point, our production was just getting set up-we weren't even sure where we were going to produce yet. I had just left school, too. So I knew that if I took on other projects. . . .

VON FURSTENBERG: How old were you then?