Hooray for Hollywould!
2003 CFDA Fashion Awards
By: Jenny Bailly
Photos below: Holly Dunlap
Photos courtesy of Hollywould

"When [CFDA president] Peter Arnold called me I thought it was a prank," laughs the 30-year-old founder of three-year-old accessories firm Hollywould. "Then the next day we got a packet in the mail from them so I was like, 'If this is a joke, it's really elaborate.'"

"Last year when we heard about the nominations - like a week later - we thought, 'That's something maybe we could get in five or six years,'" Dunlap recalls. "I never thought we would be nominated any time soon."

But ever since Hollywould's first flirty shoe collection hit Bergdorf Goodman in spring 2000, things have happened quickly. The company opened a boutique in Nolita in 2001, only to expand to a bigger space a block away within a year. With Sophie Dahl and Cameron Diaz snapping up your ballet flats and starlets from Liv Tyler to Mena Suvari falling for your sexy sandals, a business grows up fast.

As did Dunlap. "I knew what I wanted to do and was really focused from when I was little," she says. As a high school summer student at F.I.T., she interned with socialite designer Carolyne Roehm and later Todd Oldham. Those summers also introduced her to the New York club scene, where she was dubbed Hollywould. The nickname turned out to be prophetic, because Dunlap later fell in love with the sexy glamour of LA ("It's so much better than New York, I can't even begin," she gushes.)

At 21, after graduating from Parsons in Paris, the Arizona native stayed in France to work at Christian Lacroix before moving on to London and Vivienne Westwood. Back in the US after a visa mix-up, she landed in LA, styling for photographer Peggy Sirota.

Then, at 24, Dunlap became the head designer at Lilly Pulitzer, charged with breathing new life into its preppy prints.

"I grew up as a teenager being really into Vivienne Westwood and punk rock, but I was raised in Lilly Pulitzer," Dunlap explains. "So working for Vivienne was my dream, and then on the other hand, working for Lilly had always been my dream."

That preppy Lilly spirit is certainly alive in Hollywould's shoes and bags. The "Jungle Luxe" spring collection, for example, is heavy on hot pink and green. The punk rocker is there too though. "It's always a mix, it's the rebelling against the country club thing," Dunlap says. "This is more rock club than country club though," she admits, pointing to a black crocodile thigh-high boot from the fall collection.

The young entrepreneur first landed on the shoe idea when she figured, "I could find really cool clothes at Salvation Army, but the one cool thing I could never find thrift-shopping was shoes." Besides, after three years at Lilly, "I was kind of sick of clothes," Dunlap admits. "And I'd always known I wanted to do my own thing."

So it was off to Italy for a crash course in shoe production at the factories of Manolo Blahnik, Sergio Rossi and more.

"The shoe guys were like 'This funny blonde American girl thinks she's going to have a shoe line?' They were more trying to introduce me to their sons and have their wives make me dinner than actually giving me the answers to the questions I needed," Dunlap recalls. "But they couldn't have been more friendly."

The funny blonde American girl got enough answers to land herself a line though, and put out her first collection, made up of only wood-bottom shoes. "I found a tiny little factory that was willing to work with an unheard-of person ... but they only made wood-bottoms," she explains. Three years later, Hollywould is using a factory that also works with Louis Vuitton, Celine, Dior and Ferragamo.

Now Hollywould is looking to retail expansion and, yes, a clothing line. "I've been saying it'll happen next season for the last three seasons, so I don't want to say that again because I'm afraid that'll jinx it," Dunlap says of her return to clothing design. "But hopefully that'll happen soon. I'd love to expand into all the categories that our girl fits."

Hollywould Retail Store

Dunlap describes that girl as someone "who doesn't mind being the center of attention and always has high sex appeal. She's into pink, high heels, Barbie." And though the brand is based in New York, the Hollywould girl is no Manhattanite. "New Yorkers get our shoes, but it's not really their brand," reasons Dunlap. "Our big customers are LA and London."

Hence, the next two Hollywould outposts will be in those cities. First will come LA at the end of this year. "I don't know where yet, I need to go out and pound the pavement," says the businesswoman, still as hands-on as ever. "I wanted it to be on Hollywood Boulevard, but I don't really think there's a spot for us up there" -- though she does describe some of her first wood-bottom heels as "old-school hooker shoes."

In that spirit of irreverence, before Dunlap heads back to Italy next month (she spends six months a year there and has an apartment in Florence), her team is hosting a "let-your-hair-hang-down kegger" in their Nolita store - likely spilling out onto the street – to celebrate the nomination that has propelled Holly way beyond would-be status.

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