Barbara de Vries - Bio
"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do" - Rumi
DESIGN IS EVERYTHING IS DESIGN
How do I pull my illustrious design career into a solo brand identity that delivers a dopamine rush via the single-minded algorithm of the ADHD collective, while scoring non-hostile followers?
When design is everything and everything is design, where is my little patch of paradise, an online haven of inspiration, devoid of greed and envy?
In my beginning, there’s Stupid Model, first my career starter tool (1980) and eventually my first book (2014), published just before #MeToo and Jeffrey Epstein, although my modeling journal weeps with the infamy of rape culture and underage trafficking. Illustrated from cover to cover and printed to look like my diary, it’s the coolest limited edition, ahead of its time. While modeling is only a tiny part of my story, by the time I was twenty I’d grown wiser from the sordid experience of working in an industry of men who are now either dead or in prison.
Following my ambition, I was a fashion student in London when I came of age, while modeling had paid my way from Amsterdam to Paris to Australia to the UK. After two decades of shaping myself, fashion designer was my identity.
I designed my way through four decades, in London, New York, and Tokyo and sold to Harvey Nichols, Bergdorf Goodman, Kashiyama, many celebrities, and worked for major US brands, including Calvin Klein where I launched the CK Collections. I had my own, namesake collections in the UK, US and Japan, and expanded into home design as the international Creative Director for Pantone … only to land hard in Miami (2010) where fashion design meant thong bikinis, sarongs, caftans and Cuban shirts, all in happy colors.
I was confused. Now what.
Before I realized, I was turning design on its head. In 2025, from the other end of the binoculars, I see more clearly: Horrified by the amounts of plastic that washes up on local and island beaches, I redesigned beach plastic—particles of an object that had been designed to follow a function. Nature had its way, the forces of sea, sand and weather, and gave the plastic a new, abstract identity. I took these inspiring forms to create designs that gave voice to plastic pollution, one of the most catastrophic environmental disasters or our time. Of course, in Miami, nothing cleared a room faster than when I proselytized (one dinner-party partner called me “Debbie Downer” and turned away).
This was my beginning of giving voice to others, their work, their causes, by writing, photographing, designing and creating books. I’ve made books on the work of artists, architects, photographers, designers, and even a chef. More cerebral than how we dress, books are the vehicle to show design in all its forms, while, ironically, the design of the book itself— bound sheets, spine and cover—hasn’t changed much in two thousand years. It is the world inside the book, be it just written words, or accompanied by illustrations and photographs, that continues to transport us to places we don’t know exist. Didn’t know we needed.
A MORE TRADITIONAL BIO:
Amsterdam-born Barbara de Vries is a designer, book maker and activist. After studying design at the Royal College of Art, she had her own critically acclaimed fashion label in London before moving to New York in the late eighties. In 1991, she created and launched the CK collections at Calvin Klein. Barbara subsequently started her own fashion company with namesake collections in the US and Japan. Her clothing was sold at prestigious stores like Barneys NY, Kashiyama Japan, Harvey Nichols UK, etc. In 1997 she won the WWD (Fairchild) Fresh Face Award.
In 2008 she co-founded Gordon de Vries Studio and has since produced, designed, and written, books on design, architecture, fashion and lifestyle.
Barbara has been a passionate anti-plastic pollution activist since 2005, and uses art and design to raise awareness of this urgent environmental issue. Her work was featured in the Sundance move “One Beach”, in Vogue, and at Art Basel, Miami, 2012-2017. She has given talks on plastic pollution at TEDx Miami, The Coral Gables Museum, The Nature Conservancy, etc. In 2014 she was awarded the Dutch American Heritage Day award for her contribution to the environment.
Her books Living Upriver, Artful Homes Idyllic Lives (2023) and Coming Home: Modern Rustic, Creative Living in Dutch Interiors (2021) are published by Rizzoli and available at leading booksellers.
Barbara writes for select publications like DV8, Sentimental Journal, and sometimes newspapers like The Miami Herald and others: Did Calvin Klein Empower Women or was he just Another Sexist?