Nicole Miller, who will celebrate 45 years in business in 2027, has been obsessed with fashion since she was a little girl.
“My mother was French from Paris, and so we always had French fashion magazines at home. So I was like a kid in the Berkshires obsessed with fashion,” said the 74-year-old founder of Nicole Miller, in her showroom at 525 Seventh Avenue in New York City.
“I was hell bent on becoming a model, and measuring myself every day. It was like 5’4”, 5’4”, 5’4”, and never 5’4” and a quarter. So I thought, ‘I’ve got to switch gears here, and second choice, I’ll be a designer.”
Miller attended Rhode Island School of Design, and then did her own exchange program at the Chambre Syndicale in Paris, so she managed to get two degrees in four years.
After college she worked in New York City at Clovis Ruffin and then Rain Cheetas. One day she ran into a girlfriend from R.I.S.D. on the street, who said, “Oh, I got a new job and I’m going to Paris. I’m going to Hong Kong,” and Miller thought to herself, “I need a better job.”
She saw an ad in WWD for a company called P.J. Walsh, which read, “Designer willing to travel to Paris.”
“It was just exactly what I wanted and I got the job.” And that’s where she met Bud Konheim, who became her business partner for 37 years. They scraped money together and started the Nicole Miller company in 1982.
When asked to describe what kind of partnership it was, Miller joked, “Well, what I always would say about Bud is nobody else would get along with him.
“I’m like a very chill person. And he had a huge personality. So he was a lot of fun, but he could also be really embarrassing,” Miller said.
She recalled one time she and several designers such as Regina Kravitz, Jessica McClintock from Gunne Sax, and Peter Noviello and Sherrie Bloom of Chetta B were visiting a store, and they would do runway-like presentations and talk to the group.
“It was my turn and I was supposed to talk, and Bud got up in the back and said, ‘I’m writing a book.’ He wasn’t writing a book. It was totally made up. But he got the whole audience mesmerized, and everybody is like, ‘I want to see when your book comes out. We can’t wait to read it.’ I started hiding under the table. I don’t know if he did it because he thought I didn’t want to talk, so he would take over, or he just wanted attention. But he would always do these attention-getting things.”
She also recalled a time they were at a luncheon for Avenue Magazine and at a long table for 20 people. “We get there. Nobody could have a conversation. He controlled the whole table. Nobody talked to each other. They had to sit and listen [to Konheim] for the whole lunch.”
Miller was asked what has changed most at the brand she founded and what has remained true to the original vision.
“You know, it was interesting how the company started because [today] kids say, you have to have this vision and blah, blah, blah. Back then we were all just focused on staying in business and we had a bit of a vision. I mean, we started out being a dress company.” She said they were a contemporary brand focused on making “cool fun dresses.”
She said items would turn much faster because if a department store was selling something, they would want more. “The didn’t want to wait for the next season. They would want more right away. So we had this dress the first year, and sold $5 million worth of that dress.” It was a blouson dress with hip smocking. “You know how they used to put those hanger straps, so it hung loose on the hanger? We never did that. We just sent it out oversize and big, and when it first came out, it looked really avant-garde. But everybody, every dress company, copied that dress. Everybody bought it. Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf’s, everybody, and they couldn’t keep it in stock,” she said.
She said over the years, they needed the balance of department stores and specialty stores. “A lot of mom and pops would do a tremendous amount of business. I know the department stores were always asking for markdown money. I think you just have to build it into the cost of your clothes,” Miller said.
Eventually, they added sportswear to the dresses, and then the licensing deals started to come. First there was handbags, and then they added shoes with Stuart Weitzman, his first shoe licensee, and then they had perfume.
She recalled when they opened a store on Madison Avenue, she took some of her favorite prints and made them into scarves and Konheim said, “Make me a few ties.” The ties became a huge business until men stopped wearing ties.
As the story goes, Konheim wore one and sent the other 59 to the designer’s Madison Avenue store, where an enterprising security guard took one to his other job at the Metropolitan Opera gift shop. The manager there recognized a Met Opera ticket in the print and ordered the $90 ties, which sold out in three days.
“And then we get a lawyer’s letter from the Met saying, ‘Well, you’re using our logo.’ Well, you’re selling them in the store and apparently they’re asking for more ties again,” Miller recalled.
Miller said back then, they wouldn’t need to get permission to borrow the logos. “Back in the day, nobody was territorial. Like we did that candy tie and had Hershey’s and Mars in together, and one of them said, ‘Oh, we love the tie, but don’t put us in with our competitors next time.'”
A turning point in the business came when she staged her first fashion show. “The first collection was huge because I had Christy [Turlington], Linda [Evangelista], Naomi [Campbell]. I had all these girls in my show. It was spring ’91, and I had it at a place called Laura Belle. Up until then we were just considered like a commercial brand,” Miller said. From there, they stood out from the rest of the dress companies.
Discussing some of the biggest challenges in building her brand over the last 45 years, Miller said among them is when something comes in and it doesn’t fit. “We had this huge order for Saks at one time, and it was a two-piece set with a knit top and a tulle skirt. And once everybody put the tops on, all the beads popped off,” Miller recalled. They manufactured about 1,000 or so.
“The worst thing that happened was when our buyer from Bloomingdale’s, I think, quit and went into business and did knockoffs of our ties,” she said. “And the artwork was nowhere nearly as good. She was making them for $30 and ours were like $90 or $110. It really hurt the business.”
At the company’s peak, they had about 30 stores in the U.S., plus a store in Mexico City, one in São Paulo, two or more in Japan, two in Spain and two in Germany.
Following Konheim’s death in 2019 from a bicycle accident, Miller and her husband ran the business. Then in February 2022, Nicole Miller sold the company to Gordon Brothers, the global advisory and investment firm. In addition to its womenswear collections, Miller had licensees in handbags, shoes, jewelry, home, and fragrance and beauty.
The company had been doing runway shows until 2020, and then started doing presentations. “So we kept on producing the clothes and doing the presentations. But I was kind of like, it’s time to take a break. We stopped manufacturing anything,” Miller said. She said they might get back to manufacturing again.
For the spring presentation on Wednesday night, Miller will be showing some of her favorite looks from over the years, such as a baseball dress that was worn by Turlington on the runway, and Geena Davis wore to the “League of Your Own” premiere.
This spring 2027 collection will only be custom orders and trunk shows. Some of the looks are from the past, and looks that she’s reinvented. They will show 15 looks.
“We’re also thinking of licensing out a better priced cocktail type collection going forward,” she said. Nicole Miller has a deal with QVC and has a licensee for moderate clothing with Zarella.
Today Nicole Miller has 38 licensees. She mostly gets involved with print direction for clothing and home and will often give silhouette direction for clothing as well. “I work with my creative director, who has worked for me for a really long time, on concepts and story boards. I am usually in the office four days a week,” Miller said.
She will hold a summit once a year that will cover business, marketing and design and then they’ll have a second design meeting with licensees.
Miller is active philanthropically as well, and serves on the board of R.I.S.D. and works with Publicolor, which helps kids from marginalized high schools get into college. She also enjoys water skiing and boxing. Her 30-year-old son works in the business.
Asked what excites her about the future of fashion, Miller said, “I think everything really changed a lot from back when I was designing. We were all more realistic, and now there’s incredible creative stuff out there. I worry that it’s not going to sell, but I still think there’s a lot of interesting, creative things going on. When I was starting out as a designer, it was not in the realm of possibility of making ridiculous stuff. even though we did make some things that were too sexy to sell. But everybody is so avant-garde and crazy.”