Backstage Boss: Lynne O’Neill

Photo courtesy Devin Delano

Lynne O’Neill directs a rehearsal prior to the Duckie Brown menswear show last September. Another photo of O’Neill appears on the New York Times Web site of backstage scenes.

Local girl Lynne O’Neill follows her heart to a job directing shows for New York’s Fashion Week

By Nadine Kam
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Features/Style Editor

New York Fashion Week starts today, and there will be a petite figure — perhaps in rubber slippers — calling the shots from the control booth at one end of the tents as the eyes and ears linking the front of the house with those awaiting their cues backstage.

It’s a demanding job to ensure the shows go on smoothly, but for Lynne O’Neill, whose production company is called Hula Inc., ain’t no big deal. It’s something the former Honolulu resident has been doing for 20 years, since the inception of New York Fashion Week.

O’Neill, whose family still resides in Hawaii, visits every chance she gets, and was here over the Thanksgiving through New Year holidays, a stay interrupted midway when she was called back to help with wardrobe on the TV series “Gossip Girl.” After spending a week on set, she came straight back to finish her vacation, a working trip anyway as she continued to work with designers via phone and e-mail to set up production meetings for the fall/winter shows.

O’Neill’s connection to fashion dates to childhood, when her dress style differed dramatically from that of her peers, thanks in part to her mom Florence Hanzawa’s influence. “She always had me in outfits,” O’Neill said, recalling vividly a Shirley Temple phase.

“I always liked fashion. I’d look at magazines and always thought I would have a store,” she said. “I didn’t dress like anyone else. For my prom, I wore a Pucci-esque long dress and little gold slippers. I don’t think I wanted to be different. I just wore things I liked.”

Today, she prefers edgy minimalism, perhaps mixing Commes de Garcons with rubber slippers that enable her to move quickly about the tents during fashion week.

Giving fashion a rest, she grew up to study art history.

“People always asked me, ‘What are you going to do with an art history major?’ but I always did what I wanted to do. I just follow my passion.”

Her passion led, serendipitously, to Macy’s San Francisco, where her art background came in handy producing fashion shows and special events “that were all about visual merchandising,” she said.

“At the time, I didn’t even know that jobs as a fashion coordinator existed. This was the early ’80s, but I was lucky to have had the chance to work with some great designers over many seasons, like Tommy Hilfiger, Willi Smith, Geoffrey Beene, Perry Ellis and Betsey Johnson.”

LYNNE O’NEILL’S FASHION WEEK SCHEDULE » Today: BCBG Max Azria, Duckie Brown (men’s), Ports 1961, Mik  Cire by Eric Kim (men’s)» Saturday: Twinkle by Wenlan » Sunday: Luca Luca, Herve Leger, Commonwealth Utilities (men’s) » Monday: General Idea (men’s), Perry Ellis (men’s) » Tuesday: Max Azria » Wednesday:Douglas Hannant

It is quite a different world today, with little girls as young as 6 and 7 aspiring to be fashion stylists. Coincidentally, O’Neill will be featured in Scholastic Books Career Book series on “Real Jobs: 21 Books for the 21st Century,” scheduled for release in a year-and-a-half. The books are designed for high school students, presenting career options ranging from an ER technician to fashion event producer. The book featuring O’Neill aims to take students “behind the scenes of a fashion event to discover who the key players are and how they all work together to pull off such an event.”

O’NEILL PUT her career on hold by the end of the ’80s, when she married and dreamed she could be happy as a housewife in Tokyo.

“I thought I was over it, but people still called me to do fashion shows.”

Life as a housewife didn’t go as planned, so she headed to New York in 1990, just as New York Fashion Week was being launched. Fashion shows before then were being presented in varied locations around the city, many crumbling and unsafe. Fern Mallis, then executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, had the idea of bringing all the designers together under one roof for their press and retailer presentations. After first setting up in hotels, the shows found a home at Bryant Park in 1994.

The scope of the shows never fazed O’Neill.

“It was all so new, we didn’t know any better, but it really challenged me and made me better,” said O’Neill, who credits her organizational skill and Zen attitude with her success. Out of 80 or so official shows during fashion week, she’s produced up to 19 a season. This year, she’s producing 12 shows, nine of them in the tents, four of them today.

“I’m very organized and can see the big picture. There can be 200 people backstage, but when everything is crazy is when I get calmer. I think my job is to be calm and keep everything under control so the designers can feel comfortable.”

THIS SEASON will be the shows’ last at Bryant Park. Come fall, the show will move up a few blocks to Lincoln Center, a move that has caused worry due to new logistics involved in moving garments from the fashion center to the site.

Again, O’Neill is the picture of calm. “I’m excited about the change. It’s a little farther away, but IMG (producers of fashion week) is very organized so I’m confidant. They make it all turn-key.”

There is also a notion that in the Internet age, with designers able to take their shows to the public and retail buyers without a media spectacle, that the shows may one day be outmoded.

“I don’t think anything will take the place of a fashion show because it is theater, a chance for a designer to present his vision. There’s nothing that can take the place of seeing how pieces actually move, the shape of things,” O’Neill said. And certainly nothing that can take the place of the magic spell cast over a room for those 15 to 20 minutes of show time.

“When the lights go out and the music starts, and the first models come out, It’s a really exciting moment,” O’Neill said. “I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to do what I do just by following my heart.”

Ivy Higa: Can’t stop the muse

Courtesy Ivy h.
Ivy Higa’s wearable, stylish creations were an instant hit with her friends, and led her to develop her Ivy h. line. Shown are looks from her Spring/Summer 2010 collection.

A UH grad who traded sculpting clay for sculpting silhouettes, rolls out her new collection

By Nadine Kam
Features/Style Editor
Honolulu Star-Bulletin

Ivy Higa never gave it a second thought. She explored the world of ceramics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa just because it was something she wanted to do. But, upon graduating with her art degree, she promptly turned her attention toward making a living. To her surprise, that didn’t include clay.

Instead, Higa found herself in the men’s department at Neiman Marcus where proximity to fine clothing reawakened designer fantasies dormant since her teens.

“I’d been sewing and designing since I was 13. It was just something I did as a hobby, but after three years of working at Neiman, I thought, ‘I could do this.’

“I loved everything about fashion there, the construction, the quality, but I had some of my own ideas,” she said by phone from Manhattan, where she is putting the finishing touches on her Fall/Winter 2010 collection, set to debut Feb. 13 during New York Fashion Week, in an informal presentation at the New Art Center.

“During fashion week, there are about 13 shows a day, so this way people can come in, have a cocktail and leave in 5 minutes if they want to,” she said.

Not that they’d want to. Designing now for her own label, Ivy h., Higa’s designs reflect a well-constructed, effortless and modern chic that anyone versed in fashion will find worth studying in detail. Since her first presentation last September, she’s held audiences with editors from Vogue, InStyle, Elle and other publications; she’s produced looks for Eva Longoria-Parker and Oprah Winfrey; and a day after our phone interview last week, she was scheduled to meet with Vogue’s market editor for Fall/Winter 2010 editorial consideration.

Not bad for her first year-and-a-half solo effort.

Higa arrived in New York out of a desire to enroll at Parsons The New School for Design, perhaps best known these days as home base for the TV fashion design competition, “Project Runway.”

She was actually in the running to be one of the contestants on the series, but didn’t make the last cut before the series hit the air in what she believes is the season that launched Christian Siriano’s career.

“I just looked at what happened as a sign that it wasn’t meant to be, but I kept going. It helped fuel my passion even more,” she said.

Her studies at Parsons led to work in the design department at Donna Karan, before moving on to Lafeyette 148. She also was designing clothing for herself and friends, and her designs became so popular that in fall 2008 she decided to go public with her own brand. Never mind that her timing happened to coincide with one of the biggest economic busts in decades, one that hit the fashion industry particularly hard because of the discretionary nature of such purchases.

Higa staged her first New York Fashion Week presentation last fall, with her Spring/Summer 2010 collection hitting boutiques on both coasts and the South now, just as she’s about to present her Fall/Winter 2010 collection.

Just as with her pursuit of an art degree, fashion is just something she needs to do, and she can’t be deterred, no matter how rough the road.

“Nobody in fashion likes to be in the real world, although I think I’m very realistic in that my eyes were wide open going into this. I know what’s out there.”