For a Main Line mother of three (very soon to be four), Vanessa Halpert knows a few things about fashion. After all, the Bryn Mawr designer got her start in fashion at Harper’s Bazaar, made her nationwide designer debut on the Today show and cornered the bridesmaid’s dress market on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side with her first label, Vanessa Fox.

These days, Halpert has given up city life—but not the cosmopolitan fashions that have become her trademark. Under her maiden name, Fox, she still designs feminine, flirty dresses, blouses and skirts out of her appointment-only studio and showroom.

“I’ve just always loved design,” Halpert says. “That was my job as a fashion editor, to go and meet designers, and see their collections and go to the shows in Paris and New York. Ever since I was little I knew that I loved fashion and all types of dresses.”

It sounds meant to be, but Halpert was first thrown into the fashion world largely by circumstance: Her first job out of college was as an assistant to the editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar. She moved on to work at Marie Claire, then as fashion editor at now-defunct Mirabella.

After the magazine folded in 2000, “I really missed fashion,” Halpert says. “So I took a total leap of faith and started a bridesmaid line out of my living room. At that time, all my friends were getting married and there was nothing to choose from for bridesmaids—so I wanted to make bridesmaid dresses that you really could wear again, little cocktail dresses.”

Fox was soon chosen by nationwide vote to design the bridesmaids’ dresses on “Today Throws a Wedding,” beating out three more established designers in the process. “At the time, I was working out of my dining room with maybe four designs, and that’s when I decided to turn it into a real business.” She opened her Upper East Side boutique in 2001, and that spawned a line of ready-to-wear clothing she sold at stores across the country.

These days, life as a Main Line mom means working on a smaller scale—and Halpert says her days working with bridesmaids are over. But from her airy Bryn Mawr studio, situated in a retrofitted steam plant that once heated a large estate, she turns out two collections a year, sold at Wayne’s Gramercy Boutique and directly to a growing clientele of in-the-know Mainliners. “My silhouettes are pretty basic: it’s about fit and trims and fabrics. I love working with bold colors and beautiful fabrics,” she says. “I have clients who will come in and order the same boat-neck dress in floral chiffon and black wool; from season to season they just change the fabric.”

1. Just love Vanessa Fox dresses! They are divine and as pretty as she is.

   Posted by Beth Dunn | March 25, 2009, 9:47 am