Erin Fetherston's Fairytales

Courtesy of Erin Fetherston Playful designer Erin Fetherston looks like a storybook heroine and designs girlish dresses for grown women. Meet fashion's newest princess.

Fashion designer Erin Fetherston seems to have walked straight out of a fairytale and onto the runway. To begin with, Fetherston’s piercing doll eyes, sharp platinum bangs, and skin as white as snow call to mind Lewis Carroll’s signature heroine Alice. And then there’s her designs—signature ruffled hems, flouncy organza frocks and sweet floral prints—which appeal to princesses of both the enchanted and Park Avenue varieties. Her ethereal aesthetic has earned Fetherston both an Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award and a CFDA nomination by the age of 25 and her whimsical collections conjure up memories of long lost girlhood fantasies. And while the angelic Fetherston may look like a naïve Alice, she is much more of an all-knowing Cheshire Cat.

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“For me, clothing was the most powerful vehicle for fantasy,” the 27-year-old says of her clothing-obsessed childhood. A style maven in the making, the young Fetherston says that she refused to leave the house without the perfect ensemble. She’d pile plastic beads atop layers of scarves, colorful sweaters and coats. Giant sunglasses were always a must and, if she was feeling especially fancy, a tutu would be thrown into the mix.

These avant-garde antics helped Fetherston to nurture her blossoming relationship with clothes, but her intense morning regiment often conflicted with the youngster’s scholarly pursuits: “When I went to kindergarten, there was a morning class and an afternoon class. I was enrolled in the morning class. After a couple of weeks, my mom had to beg the school to switch me to the afternoon class because it was such an ordeal to get dressed. I was late every day. It was pandemonium, apparently.”