Mary McFadden’s death on Sept. 13 has made many people recall memorable moments with the designer, but Irina Simeonova has been reminded of how McFadden changed her life.
Born in Bulgaria, Simeonova worked in design there for several years until the scarcity of a future in that field and limited food supplies that had been brought on by the perestroika prompted her to come to the U.S. at the age of 27. “I didn’t know anything about immigration laws then,” she said.
Armed with a few of her sketches and a page from Italian Vogue that listed the addresses of major New York designers, she first stepped foot on Seventh Avenue after getting off the subway at West 34th Street and Seventh Avenue. McFadden’s West 35th Street showroom was the closest one on the list so Simeonova hoofed it there in search of a job. McFadden’s worldly ethos and palatial showroom resonated with Simeonova, who had been raised in a very cultural environment in Sofia, Bulgaria, where her father Hristo was an established fine artist and her uncle worked on cinema noir films with the prized director Federico Fellini.
Inside McFadden’s namesake gray building, she took the elevator to the 17th floor, “the door opened and my world changed forever,” Simeonova said. “It was like a Gilded Age-era museum, posh and absolutely gorgeous,” adding that she had told a young woman, who was en route to lunch that she was looking for a job and was advised to come back at 2 p.m.”
Simeonova did just that and was hired by the company’s president at that time, Dede Shipman, as an intern. “I got my first internship and so much more. Everything went so well that I opened my first business two years later on one of the two floors that Mary used in her building and my company was financed by the same investor,” she said, noting how she had created her debut collection for a show celebrating the opening of the United Nations’ theater.
Mary McFadden, Oscar de la Renta and Pearl Nipon in 1982.
Sonia Moscowitz/WWD Archive
“They were tremendous help. Everything that happened later in my career was from having been there and been exposed to them,” she said.
McFadden didn’t just offer feedback about Simeonova’s work, but she took the younger designer everywhere including to swanky parties like one at Tiffany & Co. “I didn’t even have any of the right clothes to go to these places. I was so underdressed, but I went. Just the exposure was fantastic.”
Employees at McFadden’s company stayed for years, and that loyal environment was something that Simeonova said she has never seen again in her career. “They absolutely loved it there. People were helping each other. It was very harmonious, and Mary was really a character,” she said.
When the atelier’s French-trained technician Lily Granick was struck and killed by a bus, McFadden closed the factory on the day of her funeral so that everyone could attend. At the burial, they threw flowers on her grave until they were level with the ground, according to McFadden’s memoir “My Story.”
Although Simeonova was a newcomer in the industry and her English-speaking skills were lacking to open a business, “they encouraged me, and opened their doors for me to start a business. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be where I am now,” she said.
Now part of the faculty at The New School’s Parsons School of Design and the founder of the nonprofit Red Fashion School in Norwalk, Conn., Simeonova also runs the New England Fashion + Design Association, a community organization. Simeonova said she is trying to change other people’s lives in the way that McFadden changed her life. “It’s a beautiful circle, if you are given something and you can pass it down,” she said. “Just sharing the stories of my experiences with Mary McFadden and my internship there gives so much hope to everybody that I am teaching. It’s just incredible.”
Simeonova added that she qualified to become a U.S. citizen, due to qualifying as a person “with extraordinary opportunity.” After more than 32 years as a green card holder, Simeonova became a U.S. citizen recently.