Beverley Olivacce said she’s amazed she hasn’t seen the “Barbie” movie yet. When she was a child, growing up in London, she would make clothes for her Barbies from leftover pieces of the material her mother used to sew dresses for friends, family and clothing companies in her sample-making business. Later, Olivacce would sell her own little homemade pocketbooks to local merchants, going door-to-door.
Still, she aspired to be a flight attendant. Her mother thought otherwise. “You have a flair for fashion, she told her. Why not try that?”
Mother knows best: Today Beverley Olivacce is the founder of Olivacce Apparel, a luxury women’s collection. With a small wholesale showroom at 75 Virginia Road in North White Plains, a space owned by Mount Kisco-based Diamond Properties LLC, Olivacce specializes in event and evening wear“ suits, cocktail dresses and gowns. Her clients have ranged from Nordstrom, which has stores at The Westchester in White Plains and The SoNo Collection in Norwalk, to Elephant’s Trunk Ltd. in Mount Kisco, Helen Ainson in Darien and Fred Segal in Los Angeles. She has shown her designs from New York City to the Caribbean to London. But who ultimately wears them?
“Most of the women who buy my collection are bar-mitzvah mamas and mothers of the bride (MOBs), she said over breakfast at the ebar at Nordstrom in The Westchester in White Plains. ‘Then there’s the Miami-nightlife woman.’
More and more, however, Olivacce is moving into clothes for professional women. Riding Metro-North to Manhattan, where her clothes are made, the Westchesterite said she can tell where the women on the train are headed. Their clothes, she added, are not necessarily going in the same direction.
She’s not talking about the Wall Street executives, who have a dress code, but others who forgo professionalism and even a degree of elegance for leggings, jackets and T-shirts with emblems on them. Call it the casualization of America.
‘Casual Friday robbed women of dressing up, Olivacce said of a phenomenon exacerbated by Covid. Casual Friday became Casual Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We’re casual-ed out.’
In the first half of the 20th century, she said, people were immaculately dressed. Today, there are glimpses of that aspiration. To achieve it, Olivacce added, start with the basics and the classics, which rarely go out of style. A woman’s wardrobe should consist of two or three of each of the following“ dresses, slacks, jackets a long coat and blouses or other tops.
“The accessories are the icing on the cake, she said of a good handbag, shoes, boots, a hat, a scarf and gloves. Be fashion forward with two or three pieces a season that blend with your classic wardrobe. That might be a hot slip dress or an accessory in one of fall’s colors“ lavender, sienna red, dusky forest green and fuchsia. Glide into autumn with prints and pastels that give way to solids.
Olivacce is not one of those designers who thinks jewelry must be minimalist. Everything should come together in an expression of the person, said the woman who walks the talk. On the day we met she sported a tweedy shift dress ”“ more Jackie Kennedy than Jackie O accented with thin bangles, a couple of rings and a gold quilted handbag.
If it sounds like it takes a lot to be fashionable (on-trend) or stylish (self-expressive), pity those trying to make it in the unforgiving fashion world. After graduating from the School of Fashion Design in Boston, where she moved as a teenager with her mother, Olivacce began selling her designs, including custom work, at luncheons and fashion, home and trunk shows on Boylston Street, the Fifth Avenue of Boston, and Commonwealth Avenue, a kind of Retail Row meets Museum Mile.
Moving to Weekawken, New Jersey, her design studio had seven employees. Henri Bendel, the now-defunct Fifth Avenue department store, gave her a “big break,” with her four-ply silk dresses selling out. In Manhattan’s Garment District on Seventh Avenue, she had $30,000 worth of orders in six weeks.
But just as failure often contains the seeds of success, success in turn is its own kind of pitfalls. For Olivacce who had been named the most outstanding designer in her graduating class creative success meant financial stress. She was doing it all fashion by day, bookkeeping by night. And she didn’t have mentors and investors, not so much as a fairy godfather or godmother, a sugar daddy or sugar mama. What she did have was factored invoices invoices she sold to a third party for money upfront to improve her cash flow a standard practice in the fashion world, she said. It wasn’t enough.
Taking a break from entrepreneurship, she went to work for some big names Tommy Hilfiger, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Roland Mouret and Alexander Wang. Yet she never stopped designing and selling her own collection. In January 2022, Olivacce opened her showroom in North White Plains. There, she is looking to collaborate, not only with investors but with teenagers who will attend workshops in her conference area, and adults who will give a Bev’s Talk, her idea of a TED Talk. Actress Sonya Satra, who appeared on The Guiding Light and One Life to Live did a Bev’s Talk in which she mused on how what you send out in the world returns to you.
I want to grow this Olivacce said of her showroom and business. I want women in Westchester and Connecticut to know that I’m here.
On Sept. 6 from 6 to 9 p.m., Olivacce Apparel is teaming with Black Tie magazine for a New York Fashion Week Black Tie Gala at Manhattan Motorcars, 711 11th Ave. The charity event features an international fashion show, wine tasting and art exhibit. For more, visit beverleyolivacce.com, email info@beverleyolivacce.com or call 646-470-8116.
