T H E P O W E R L I S T
W O M E N I N F A S H I O N
1. Rose Marie Bravo
Turning Plaid Into Profits
That Rose Marie Bravo recently finished reading Jane Austen's
Persuasion—a fact she announces with an impassioned "Oh!" from
her sofa on the 30th floor of the New York City offices of
Burberry —is fitting. She has engaged in a grand-scale
persuasion of her own of late that is widely considered a retail
marvel.
Since being named chief executive of the British design house
seven years ago, she has convinced the style elite that the
dormant, 148-year-old brand—with its placid beige plaid, which
had been spotted, if it was noticed at all, lining the raincoats
on markdown racks—not only is no longer a fashion anathema but
is in fact a status symbol. Her feat has more than doubled the
company's sales, turning it from a $470 million-a-year enterprise
to a $1 billion behemoth.
"I didn't quite know until I got there what I was going to
uncover," says Bravo, 53. "It didn't take long to see that
underneath the debris there was this beautiful, quality heritage.
Of course, part of it was that the timing was right to restore.
People were interested in it." The checks are now vaunted on ball
gowns, bikinis and stilettos. There are fragrance and children's
lines and sexy ad campaigns featuring chic Brits Kate Moss and
Stella Tennant. The iconic trench coat, first designed in 1901 by
Thomas Burberry as an army officer's raincoat, today comes in a
panoply of styles, colors and prints, including this season's
floral.
She dubs the transformation "doing what Gucci did, at Burberry,"
but Bravo was displaying corporation-altering prescience and
chutzpah long before Tom Ford made them fashionable. As president
of Saks in the '90s, she brought labels like Gucci, Jil Sander
and Prada onto the selling floor, a move that began the store's
return to the luxury league of Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf
Goodman. As a cosmetics buyer at Macy's in the early '80s, Bravo
noted the sudden proliferation of fuchsia in fashion. She called
Carol Phillips, co-founder and then head of Clinique. "I said,
'This pink is wildly popular. It's everywhere in the clothing. We
don't have a lipstick that color,'" Bravo recalls. Phillips
called back to say a new lipstick would be in the line
immediately. Bravo says her biggest break came in 1988 when
Macy's promoted her from senior vice president of merchandising
to chairman and chief executive of its new acquisition, the
California-based chain I. Magnin.
If part of her intrepidity comes from growing up the daughter of
a hairdresser who owned a salon in New York City's Bronx—Bravo
attended the elite public Bronx High School of Science and
Fordham University, also in the Bronx—the rest may result from
the fact that early in her career, she saw "women in action."
Says Bravo: "In cosmetics, which is where I particularly grew up,
we had these wonderful role models. Estee Lauder, Helena
Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden are all women who created
companies." Clinique's Phillips "hired all women," Bravo says.
"Her top lieutenants were female. If you've been given this road
map and you see that others have gone before you and achieved,
you never have in your mind the notion of failure. You have the
notion that you can do it too, if you're good enough and smart
enough and make the right decisions."
