Carolyne Roehm : Designer Has Opulent Life Style and Practical, Ready-to-Wear Collections

New York-based Carolyne Roehm’s life style isn’t typical of most fledgling fashion designers. For one thing, the gumball-size, double-rope of pearls around her neck are not by Barbara Bush’s favorite costume jeweler, Kenneth Jay Lane. They’re the real McCoy.

For another, she often has access to her husband’s private jet for travel to store appearances--although on this occasion, she’s arrived in Newport Beach by commercial carrier.

As for her designs, Women’s Wear Daily had this to say about her current spring collection: “Who needs Nabisco, Henry? This cookie doesn’t crumble.”

The reference is to Henry Kravis, Roehm’s husband, whose investment firm Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. recently acquired RJR Nabisco at a cost of $25 billion--the largest corporate buyout in history.

While the current economic forecast for new designers is at best dicey, and some of the brightest fashion stars have fallen into bankruptcy in recent seasons, Kravis provided Roehm, his then-girlfriend, with the financial muscle to start her own business in 1985 rather than have “outside people” back her, she says.

Accepting Kravis’ financial backing was an angst- ridden decision, Roehm explained. She feared all the worst-case scenarios--and presented them to him one by one. What if they both fall out of love with each other? Or if he falls out first? Or she falls out first? Or “midway I decide this is the biggest folly I’ve ever been in and want to pull out”?

“I said, ‘I have to know where I stand. You cannot be doing it just because you love me, because it’s too risky,’ ” she recounted.

“And he said, ‘Well, certainly, I wouldn’t back you or probably anyone if I didn’t have a relationship with them, but I’d never back someone I love unless I thought they had the talent and the tenacity.’

“My husband says my Achilles heel is I’m a person who worries a tremendous amount,” admits the designer, who is tall and slender enough to be her own best showcase for her clothes. Her designs run the gamut from sleek, one-shoulder gowns to wool jersey jumpsuits to be worn with a jacket at the office.

Since the introduction of her first ready-to-wear collection and a new, small made-to-order line, Roehm--who toiled anonymously alongside Oscar de la Renta for 9 1/2 years as his muse, fitting model and design assistant--has proven that she’s no lightweight in the design department. Her clothes are carried in about 100 stores, and her collections, known for their simple, spare lines--”very pared down,” as Roehm puts it--and fine fabrications, have garnered glowing reviews.

Crumble she may not, but by her own admission, she does occasionally crack. Roehm says the pressures of an industry that her husband since has described as “inept,” “sophomoric,” “crazy,” and “ridiculous” are punishing, as is the couple’s social calendar.

He’s on the board of the Metropolitan Museum and the New York City Ballet. She’s on the board of the New York Public Library and actively involved with the Metropolitan Opera.

“For three years, I’ve been out four or five nights a week. I’ve been out as many as seven nights a week,” Roehm says. “Seven is lunacy,” she adds, “It also gets very boring.”

Add to that four houses to run and three stepchildren. Afternoons at a hair salon are entirely out of the question. For Roehm, it’s work, work and more work.

After a recent party given by socialite Ann Bass in Roehm’s and Kravis’s honor for their support of the ballet, Roehm was certain she was losing it. “I have had it,” she told her husband. “I can’t do it any longer. I am being pulled in every possible direction. No one in her right mind can expect to do this many things. We finished dinner and I walked in the door at 1:30 in the morning, and I have to get up at 6 a.m. to go to work.”

Indeed, the industrious woman you meet belies the princess-like image personified by her advertising campaign: nose-in-the-air portraits by Victor Skrebneski (of Estee Lauder ad fame) in her ornately decorated homes.

“See these circles?” Roehm cracks in her self-deprecating manner, gesturing toward her blue eyes. Earlier that morning, she had flown into Newport Beach to promote her clothes at Neiman Marcus and would depart the next day for her home in Vail, Colo., on Kravis’ jet.

But that afternoon, she was pacing models for a big, glitzy fashion show benefiting the Orange County Performing Arts Center. She took it in stride, outwardly at least, when informed that two of her most expensive dress samples got stuck in the zippers of their garment bags and were completely ruined.

Calling each model by name, Roehm instructed them how to smile, how to walk. She hates runway theatrics. “You’ve got to be Grace Kelly,” she informed one girl, in an effort to make her performance more regal.

Having fretted through the tough, first stages of her business, Roehm hasn’t changed much. “I am very worried at this point in my career,” she sighs. “I have a 4 1/2-year-old business, and I’m now getting involved in licensing. I went through the heartbreaking, struggling stages where everything that could go wrong went wrong, and now I’m getting into the building stage. And that will take a tremendous amount of my time.”

Much of her new-found anxiety stems from having just accepted, at the urging of her “dear, darling Oscar (de la Renta),” the presidency of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, an industry honorary society. Roehm says she has no intention of “diddling,” or becoming a “rubber stamp.”

She believes the CFDA must move in a more businesslike direction and wants to address some of the pressing problems facing the industry. “The people who make better clothing will soon be dinosaurs in America because there’s going to be no one left to make it.

“Embroidery is dead here. You cannot buy a beautifully made button in America. You can’t get a beautifully turned and made belt. When the present tailors retire, there will be no one to replace them.

“Isn’t it the responsibility of the leaders of the industry to do something to make it a desirable thing to work with your hands?”