When The Fashion Cycle Meets The Cycle Of Life

A week before his 20th-anniversary salon-style show, held on the Wednesday morning before New York Fashion Week officially opened, Narciso Rodriquez was in his Gramercy Park office showing off a gray flannel coat with three wooden buttons and a hood, lined in felted black wool. It was, like most of his clothes, understated and chic and perfectly tailored. It was also about a foot long. It was a one-off, made for Ivy Carolyn, one of his 8-month-old twins. “I have come to believe smaller is better,” Mr. Rodriguez, 57, said. He wasn’t really talking about clothes. He was talking about work/life balance. It’s an unusual topic in fashion, where the choices between the professional and the personal have rarely been part of the industry conversation the way they have in other sectors, like finance and law. For an industry that prides itself on being on the vanguard of social change, it’s another way in which fashion lags behind. But after two decades in the business — after a stint in the spotlight at Loewe as part of the first generation of designers to take over old houses and jazz them up; after seeing fashion move from being about silhouette and seam to being about entertainment; after rejecting the gilded cage of creative directorship and returning to New York and an independent business; after weathering Sept. 11 and the recession of 2008 — Mr. Rodriguez had decided to put the matter on the pattern-making table. Read more at The New York Times.