Mary McFadden’s Odyssey
January 21, 2009
Mangolian mandalas, Tibetan tankas, Japanese sashes, and African sculptures coexist in harmony in the designer’s jewel-box apartment.
Entering fashion designer Mary McFadden’s Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River, I understand why McFadden has been referred to by fashion cognoscenti as the “archeologist of Seventh Avenue,” the main drag of New York’s fashion center. The one-bedroom space on the second floor of a modern black high-rise on the Upper East Side is a jewel box filled with religious iconography and decorative elements based on the remote civilizations that have inspired her couture designs for some 30 years.
“So-called ancient people may have been more evolved than us,” says McFadden. “Look at the pyramids. I’m not sure that we could have built the pyramids with such accuracy.”
Most of what she has collected for the past decade has been Buddhist art, although she says she is not Buddhist herself and declines to specify her religion. The striking brooch she is wearing, of hand-forged brass dipped in 22-karat gold, comes from a jewelry collection she designed and named after Saladin, the Muslim conqueror who unified the Arab world in the 12th century. It is pinned to a quilted black coat worn over a long, white, asymmetrically cut linen skirt that falls to the heels of her black strappy sandals. Continue reading . . .
