University of Illinois Alumni Association

Clothing designer Eileen Fisher has created a company that flows on currents of creativity and collaboration. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times/Redux Photo)

By Mary Timmins

Eileen Fisher ’72 ACES is dressed in black and sitting on a love seat in a long, wide, elegant room on the second floor of her long, wide, elegant home overlooking the Hudson, where that river shapes a calm green valley north of New York City. This is Irvington. Named for the writer whose headless horseman haunted the neighboring countryside, Irvington is also Eileen Fisher territory.

A couple of bends southward, two old brick buildings, shoebox-shaped and squeezed alongside the riverbank and the railroad tracks, house her clothing company’s administration and operations. On down the Hudson, where the river margins the glowing showcase of skyscrapers and neon signifying Manhattan, a 6,000-square-foot showroom in the midst of the garment district provides a sleek, coolly spacious venue for the display and marketing of her handsome designs. Some blocks away, designers create and collaborate in a new state-of-the-art center, where their work becomes fruitful and multiplies. Around the ever-globalizing globe, workshops and factories spin and weave and cut and stitch and ship, turning out Eileen Fisher clothes that flatter the bodies of prosperous professional women with elegant and forgiving cuts. Thirty-three stores, four outlets and two boutiques – not to mention major department stores everywhere – offer her lines. Over the three fashion seasons of 2006 – spring, fall and resort – Eileen Fisher shipped more than 1.3 million pieces of apparel and grossed approximately $225 million in sales.

Eileen Fisher is relaxing on a love seat in the long, wide elegant room that is her studio. Her home is beautiful with a wooden spiral staircase and places to swim indoors and out and sparely furnished chambers that evince an Asian simplicity, echoed in the fabric hangings that interrupt each threshold. What she is about to say concerning the complications of her work is not what one would expect a designer of clothing ever, ever to say. What Eileen Fisher is about to say, and then does say, is that sometimes she gets up in the morning and has trouble figuring out what to wear.

“I can just walk in the store and take 12 more garments of anything I want,” she laments. “It seems like a positive problem. But nonetheless, you still have this closet full of things, and you still can’t find that one pair of black pants that you wanted to wear.” She is laughing. “I don’t get a lot of sympathy for this problem.”

Beyond the love seat, a rack dangles with jackets and skirts and trousers and blouses all cut to her size, an Eileen Fisher “small” (aka, misses’ sizes 6-8). Beyond the rack lurks her personal closet, the size of an executive office and filled with garments in black and ivory and chewy earth tones and accommodating pastels. Many items cling to racks, while many more, folded and stacked, mount ceilingward. “Pretty much I try to keep the clothes simple and timeless and that kind of thing,” she continues, “and have the ones that work best on me.”

Timely vs. trendy
Amid the narcissistic, dysfunctional “Devil Wears Prada” ethos of the fashion world, Eileen Fisher – the woman and the company – are not typical. Indeed, at an elemental level, Eileen Fisher isn’t about fashion at all. Eileen Fisher is about fad-proof garments that can be assembled, added to, coordinated, mixed and matched and massed into a high-quality wardrobe of indefinite shelf life – the antithesis of the changing whims of haute couture. Eileen Fisher is “really passionate about making things that are timeless, that transcend the moment, but somehow belong to the moment, but kind of live beyond that,” the designer says. “And I think it does come from Midwestern values. People in the Midwest just dress more simply and more practically.”

Lisa Lockwood, news director for Women’s Wear Daily – a five-times weekly encyclical for the fashionista set – terms Fisher “an iconoclast.”

“The beauty of her company is that her fashions flatter all body shapes and sizes,” said Lockwood, noting that such shapes and sizes may not wriggle too well into, say, the tight jeans and tiny sequined tops that have been slinking down the runways of late. Eileen Fisher is, indeed, conspicuous in disengagement from the runway scene. Eileen Fisher designs do not strut and whirl and make moues alongside the Diors and the Guccis and the Versaces and the Valentinos in the photo-flashing, celebrity-intensive shows of seasonal collections in Paris, New York and Milan. The models who exhibit her clothing on the pages of The New York Times Magazine and O and Vanity Fair have faces from which age has not been erased and character has not been airbrushed, and bodies of varying shapes and heights. They might be – and this has sometimes been the case – Fisher’s own friends and employees. They might even be – though this has not yet been the case – Fisher herself.

The designer has long, straight, gray hair, a benediction of a smile and intent eyes that fix and shift from hazel to brown to hazel again behind little pomegranate-framed glasses. “I’ve always been influenced by different kinds of ethnic clothing. Like the Japanese kimono,” Fisher says. She rises and goes to the rack beyond the love seat to extract a jacket and hold it up by the shoulders. “I spent some time in Japan. I had a Japanese boyfriend for four years, years ago. So I got very influenced by that. … For, like 1,100 years in Japan, all they wore was the kimono shape. It was classic. You couldn’t improve on it.”

Fisher may be a genius, if that word is taken in its classical sense, as the guiding spirit of a place or enterprise – and if, moreover, that spirit absorbs influences as readily as exerting them. Take going to Catholic school in Des Plaines and the uniforms she wore for 12 years there. “Much as I hated wearing the uniform for 12 years, being forced to, you realize that there’s something simple about it,” she says. And, always, she aims for that simplicity. “The simpler the garment, the more flexibility you have in the ways you can wear it.”

“Oh, my God, I can do this”
Beyond Catholic school awaited more colorful inspirations. Transferring to the University of Illinois after two years at Northern Illinois University, Fisher found “there was something just much more expansive about it. … I found myself around engineers and architects and philosophers and artists. … And I felt like people were smart and teachers were so supportive. I felt like, ‘Oh, my God, I can do this.’”

Starting out as a math major, she shifted to home economics and pursued her passion for design. She got friendly with her collaborative self. She remembers building and furnishing a model house for an interior design class. “At one point, I had 40 kids that came through and helped me with my project,” Fisher says. “My roommate counted.

“I saw that they were interested in what I was doing, they were interested in my idea, they wanted to build what I wanted them to build, or they wanted to contribute according to how I saw the picture. … We made it really fun. It might have been a seed for the kind of business I wanted to have.” By the time she left U of I, she says, “I came to think of myself as a designer.”

Thus, an exponential success story begins with youth and fearlessness. In postgraduation mode, Fisher headed for New York, finding work in interior and graphic design and also discovering that sometimes she would get up in the morning and have trouble figuring out what to wear. She began to design and make her own clothes and in 1984 displayed four pieces – jacket, skirt, trousers, top – at a show for boutique clothiers. Fisher got a big order, borrowed money to fill it, bought fabric, engaged a seamstress, produced the order, got more orders, found a loft, got more orders and – from there the tale goes turbo. By 1995, Eileen Fisher was grossing $50 million annually. Three years later, that figure had doubled. Sales for 2007 are projected to increase 10 percent to $250 million.

Running on collaboration
The new Eileen Fisher design center on New York’s lower Fifth Avenue opened about a year ago, taking over the 10th floor of a classic Flatiron building. Open to the light on four sides, the space is defined by wooden floors and filmy curtains and low dividers and wheeled partitions. Big work spaces edge up to clusters of desks. Discreet meeting rooms are among the few areas with doors. Clothing designers sketch and cut and sew and display and talk over their work, while models and photographers and marketers and retailers show up and so do other people, coming from all over the company for the big creative meetings known as “deep dives.” There’s a yoga room and a kitchen and a meditation room where a small refrigerator has been installed specifically to store milk for employees’ babies.

“It’s a place that’s pretty expressive of the aesthetics and the collaborative way we work,” Fisher says. “I think there’s a lot of sense of connection and how it goes together and how the line comes together and how it then will be presented in stores. And all that is an ongoing conversation that happens very naturally because of just being in an open space together.”

Brad Daley, who helps run the center – including leading visitors on tours – said, “Everything Eileen does is so focused on making this a great place to work. … Her name’s on the door, but she really doesn’t want it to be about that.” Daley came to Eileen Fisher from a different kind of perfectionist – Martha Stewart, goddess of domestic detail. “I’ve never heard anyone raise their voice in four years at the company,” he observed. “That was an hourly occurrence at Martha Stewart.”

Eileen Fisher – the woman and the company – run on collaboration. At Illinois, she says, she was painting in a class and “got lost in the color blue.”

“I remember the art teacher coming over and saying, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting what you’re doing.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, the teacher think it’s interesting – what I’m doing. What I’m doing? Wow!’ There was something very meaningful about that. I felt seen. I felt talented.” Now Fisher, who was an Illini Comeback guest in 1998, works at paying that feeling forward in “an intentional trying to grow people and help people find their way.” This means job flexibility, yoga classes (a company legend) and profit sharing (practiced from the start). Every employee gets two yearly bonuses of $1,000 to pay for education and wellness. Masseurs show up each Friday at the various New York and Irvington offices (where there are also exercise rooms and spas), heralding the weekend with relaxation on company time. The company in turn is rewarded with stability – the average employee turnover for last year was 15 percent at Eileen Fisher, compared with 25 percent to 40 percent in the retail industry. “She has really been in the forefront of benefits for employees,” notes Women’s Wear Daily’s Lockwood, who said that other companies are now following the example.

Taking care of her own is global as well as local for Fisher. A director of social consciousness works to ensure that the company purchases fabric and orders clothing from workplaces worldwide that are committed to humane conditions. Employee committees steward philanthropic and social causes. “Eileen started out and didn’t have much money but had a lot of support from friends,” her publicist, Kerri Devaney, said. “Now that she’s a wildly successful fashion designer, she can give back to people who might not have had the kind of support she had.”

Last winter, five women entrepreneurs received grants from Eileen Fisher, including Anna Cohen, a young West Coast fashion designer. In business for just two years and already getting international attention, Cohen said the $10,000 award was “totally needed,” but the true value of the honor was flying to New York to visit the company and meet the designer. “It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had,” Cohen said. “To see the culture she’s set up – it makes me absolutely want to provide that for a company as I grow.”

In January, Fisher made The Wall Street Journal when she sold a third of the company to her employees through their retirement plan – a cleverly structured way to raise capital, avoid going public and give the staff a bigger stake. “Sometimes I say, ‘My company has just graduated from college,’” Fisher says. “It feels like that.” The capital – about $30 million – will diversify the designer’s holdings, creating a more secure future for her and her children, Zack, 17, and Sasha, 14.

Sasha – whom her mother describes as “dancing and running and getting straight As” – is home from school on this cool morning upriver in Irvington, and soon the talk in the long, wide, elegant studio will conclude, and Fisher will go spend time with her daughter.

In the river – again
The view out the windows echoes Fisher’s imagery as she talks. “The river. That’s our metaphor all the time. Because it’s always changing. … You bring a line together, but then a new idea comes, and you push that into the store. It’s constantly in motion. So we’ve learned to kind of work with that, and we joke about it as being ‘in the river.’ ‘Oh, here we are in the river again. Something’s changing.’”

Eileen Fisher is a concept that has been moving over time from the woman herself into those who create and produce her clothing and on to those who are made more beautiful by those designs. This is transference full of flux, of inspiration and generosity and pitfalls sometimes, too. Like the Hudson itself, it is a river, flowing through the mind of a designer who sometimes gets up in the morning and has trouble figuring out what she’s going to wear.