Barbara de Vries - Bio
"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do" - Rumi
SHORT AND RECENT BIO:
Amsterdam-born Barbara de Vries is a creative director, designer and bookmaker. After studying design at the Royal College of Art, she had her own critically acclaimed fashion label in London before moving to New York in the late eighties. In 1991, she created and launched the CK collections at Calvin Klein. Barbara subsequently started her own fashion company with namesake collections in the US and Japan. Her clothing was sold at prestigious stores like Barneys NY, Kashiyama Japan, Harvey Nichols UK, etc. In 1997 she won the WWD (Fairchild) Fresh Face Award. In 2008 she co-founded Gordon de Vries Studio and has since produced, designed, and sometimes written, books on design, architecture, fashion and lifestyle. Barbara has been a passionate anti-plastic pollution activist since 2005, and uses art and design to raise awareness of this urgent environmental issue. Her work was featured in the Sundance move “One Beach”, in Vogue, and at Art Basel, Miami, 2012-2017. She has given talks on plastic pollution at TEDx Miami, The Coral Gables Museum, The Nature Conservancy, etc. In 2014 she was awarded the Dutch American Heritage Day award for her contribution to the environment. When her twin daughters moved to the Netherlands to study design, Barbara was inspired to make a book that felt like coming home. Her latest book Coming Home: Modern Rustic, Creative Living in Dutch Interiors is published by Rizzoli and available in September 2021.
LOOONG BIO:
Barbara de Vries was born in Amsterdam, where she entered fashion by making clothes for herself, satin pants for friends in bands, and carved and sold leather belts and hippy-ish jewelry.
At age 17 she became a model and lived in Paris, where she did the couture shows and fashion ads for ELLE and Marie Claire, she then moved to Australia where she became a Cosmo cover girl as well as the infamous Razzamataaz girl. She settled in London, where she modeled for Vogue, Bazaar, and Zandra Rhodes before giving up modeling and attending St. Martins, Harrow and the Royal College of Art, to study fashion.
She briefly worked as a designer for Stirling Cooper before creating a collection for the movie star Faye Dunaway's boutique in Santa Monica, which was the start of her own (punkish) collection in London called Giraf.
After ten years in London, she moved to New York to launch CK for Calvin Klein.
After meeting her husband to be, she went freelance and designed a collection under own name in Japan as well as the USA and after the birth of her first daughter she added children's wear to her brand.
As a freelance designer and creative director she worked on projects for Ralph Lauren, Dim, Petit Bateau, Go Silk and Pantone, all from her studio in Milford, Pennsylvania.
She first spotted plastic on the beaches of in Eleuthera in 2006, became passionate about the ocean plastic pollution cause, and started Plastic is Forever.
In 2006, together with her with her husband, author Alastair Gordon, she founded the publishing and media company Gordon de Vries Studio and in 2009 they moved to Miami, where Barbara continued creating: designing and publishing books, exhibitions, podcasts and lectures (like a TedX at New World Center) and a movie called One Beach.
In 2015, missing the texture of beautiful fabrics in her life, she returned to the studio and started designing and making couture clothes for the Faena boutique.
"Some of my favorite moments are when we are all in our rooms, creating. The girls are working on their designs - art, fashion or graphics - Alastair is writing or painting in his studio and I am cutting, sewing or laying out a book in my atelier. Our home is filled with our work, it is designed to be our studio, making life into art."
In 2018, with her daughters away at college most of the time, Barbara moved back to her home near New York City, where most of her clients in design and publishing are located. Barbara and Alastair published more books, including Assembled in Light published by Rizzoli in 2020. When her twin daughters moved to the Netherlands to study design, Barbara was inspired to make a book that felt like coming home. Her latest book Coming Home: Modern Rustic, Creative Living in Dutch Interiors is published by Rizzoli and available in September 2021. Link to G de V Studio here. For more info on her books
Barbara writes for select publications like DV8, Sentimental Journal, and sometimes newspapers like The Miami Herald and others: Did Calvin Klein Empower Women or was he just Another Sexist?