When designer Joseph Altuzarra was a young boy his mother allowed him and his younger brother Charles choices. “If they didn’t want to wear their coats,” says Karen Altuzarra, “I would tell them, fine, but if they didn’t want to wear their coats, they could go stand in the corner. And they would often do just that, until they were ready to do what I wanted them to do, which was put on their coats. But it was their choice to stand in the corner.”
This may seem an odd story to be telling about someone who has in the past year won two of the biggest accolades awarded any young American designer – the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for emerging womenswear designer, and the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award – and whose eponymous business has grown in four years to one with 53 stockists in North America, Europe, China, Brazil, Russia and Korea.
But, sitting at a big white table in the airy warehouse space in downtown Manhattan that is Mr Altuzarra’s office and atelier, she is speaking in her capacity as his chief executive, and illustrating one of the keys to their professional relationship: she always respected her son’s decisions, even if she did not agree.