There is a wish shared by women who consider themselves serious that the clothes they wear look as if they were heedlessly flung on rather than anxiously selected. The clothes of Eileen Fisher seem to have been designed with the fulfillment of that wish in mind. Today, Eileen Fisher is an enterprise with nearly a thousand employees. The clothes sell in department stores and catalogues as well as in six Eileen Fisher shops in Manhattan and fifty-five throughout the country.
Over the years, the clothes have become less plain and more like the clothes in fashion. Some of the older Eileen Fisher customers grouse about these changes. They want the clothes to remain the same, as if anything can. Surely not clothes. I remember going into the Eileen Fisher shops that were opening around the city in the late nineteen-eighties and never buying anything. I was attracted by the austere beauty of the clothes.
They were loose and long and interesting. There was an atmosphere of early modernism in their geometric shapes and murky muted colors. You could see Alma Mahler wearing them around the Bauhaus. After a few years, the clothes changed and began to suit small thin women as well as tall substantial ones. But their original atmosphere remained. I joined a growing cadre of women who regularly shop at Eileen Fisher and form a kind of cult of the interestingly plain. She does not look like a woman who is uninterested in her appearance.
She looks glamorous and stylish. She is slender and fine-boned. Her straight, completely white hair is cut in a geometric chin-length bob. She wears dark-rimmed glasses. Her features are delicate, and there is a certain fragility about her, an atmosphere of someone who needs protection.
And she came to the interview protected, by two executives in her company: Hilary Old, the vice-president for communications, and Monica Rowe, the director of public relations. I was received in a large light room that looks out on the Hudson River and its distant shore the river is magnificently wide here through a picture window.
