High Fashion’s Ambassador From the Midwest

At 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning during Fashion Week, Jonathan Simkhai, a 27-year-old designer, awoke to the sound of his cellphone ringing. It was Goods and Services, his showroom, calling. Ikram Goldman, the owner of the Chicago boutique Ikram, wanted to see him immediately. Simkhai, who had stayed out late celebrating his successful runway show, had fallen asleep only a few hours earlier. “But I jumped out of bed,” he said.

While Simkhai was rushing downtown, Goldman, 45, flipped through the showroom racks. She wore a black taffeta Nina Ricci dress with cap sleeves and a tulip bottom over a black Rick Owens hoodie, with black work boots by Chanel. Goldman had five copies of the dress specially made; she wore the ensemble to every show she attended that week, and also to the showrooms where buyers browse collections and place orders. 

“Yumma,” she said, admiring some jeans by Frame Denim, a brand Ikram carries. “Yumma, lumma.” She caught the eye of Joey Laurenti, the showroom’s owner. “You’d better have more colors than this,” she said.

“Ikram,” he told her, “anything you want, we can do.” She spied a chain-link bracelet covered in spikes. She wanted it, but without the spikes. “I’m not insulting her collection, I just don’t want the hardness,” she said. The jewelry designer “is very flexible,” Laurenti assured her.

The owner of just one boutique in the Midwest, Goldman is nonetheless a commanding presence in New York and Paris. At runway shows, she is often seated in the front row, accompanied by her winsomely styled 4-year-old twin boys and her husband, Josh Goldman, and nearby, another buyer from her store and maybe a friend — an entourage whose size alone attests to her standing. She garners this kind of respect for a number of reasons. Even by the standards of the New York fashion world, she has an intensity that can be rattling. (“I’m not going to lie,” says Jenna Lyons, the president and creative director of J. Crew, who is an admirer of Goldman. “She scares me a little bit.”) More important, her imprimatur can help jump-start the career of a struggling young designer. Goldman was among the first buyers for Thakoon, Proenza Schouler and Prabal Gurung, and an early champion of Rick Owens and Nina Ricci’s Peter Copping.

Goldman was soon back to considering Simkhai’s line. “So there’s a lot of buzz,” she said. “But I don’t love it. It’s a little unfinished.” As she looked, she grew more intrigued; a blue bomber jacket in a high-tech fabric and a pencil skirt in the same color caught her attention. “Who’s buying this from you?” she asked Laurenti. He mentioned a few regional boutiques, as well as Barneys in New York.

“Well, he’s about to be at Ikram,” she said. “We’ll pick up a few pieces.”

“Wonderful,” said Laurenti, smiling broadly.

“A few, understand?” Goldman said. “Is he at Barneys in Chicago?”

Laurenti assured her he was not: “And we would make sure not to.”

When Simkhai arrived at the showroom, Goldman took him aside. “The collection looks really good,” she told him. Her tone was hushed, confiding. But before she’d make the buy, he had to work on his production values.

“I’m really proud of my construction,” Simkhai said, taken aback. Goldman showed him the bomber she was considering, pointing out the way the pattern finished abruptly at the ribbing and was cut off again at the top. It was not good enough. She would buy the jacket, but not like that.

A few moments later, Simkhai seemed to have recovered. “That’s really good feedback,” he said. Plus, now he could say he had been picked up by Ikram. “It’s a dream come true,” he said. In the coming days, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman both bought from his collection.

Though Goldman has no institutional backing other than her own 16,000-square-foot store, no perch in New York or Paris, she wields an outsize influence in the fashion industry. Her standing is, no doubt, due in part to her most famous Chicago client, Michelle Obama. Dressing her in the designs of young talents like Jason Wu and Thakoon Panichgul established the image of a fashion-forward first lady, primed the careers of those young designers and elevated Goldman’s reputation in the process. Yet Goldman’s relationship with the White House ended years ago, and her store has maintained its prestige. (Goldman declined to discuss the relationship, and the White House does not comment on the first lady’s personal affairs.)

The influence of a chain like Barneys is obvious, but a handful of other boutiques — including Colette in Paris, Maxfield in Los Angeles, 10 Corso Como in Milan and, of course, Ikram in Chicago — can do as much to establish a market for an emerging luxury brand as any national department store. At the highest end of the fashion industry, they are the gatekeepers and anointers. “Even if an account is from Russia, I always tell them I’m carried at Ikram,” said Stephen Courter of Ohne Titel. “They’ll have more trust in the label.”

Designers also strive to sell at Ikram for more mundane reasons. With a $4,000 dress, every sale counts. There may be more women wearing top designers on the coasts, but some portion of those high-profile figures in New York and Los Angeles get their clothes free and give them back the day after they’ve worn them. The women who shop at Ikram — society figures who fly in by private jet from Midwestern outposts, or high-ranking Chicago executives — may not be featured on fashion Web sites the morning after their museum fund-raisers, but they are the prized consumers who buy at full price.

On an afternoon in late February, one of Goldman’s clients, Kathy Taslitz, an artist, was at Ikram, shopping for something to wear to a Los Angeles party in her honor. From the racks at Ikram — silk next to taffeta next to Gore-Tex next to sequins — she admired a gauzy white Nina Ricci dress. Not that, Goldman said. Taslitz protested; it’s so beautiful. “Yes, it is,” Goldman said. “But you’ll see.” Taslitz, 54, is trim and striking, but on her, she agreed, the frothiness of the dress fell flat. Next, Taslitz put on a strapless foam-green mermaid-style dress from Lanvin. “Uh, uh, uh, uh,” Goldman said, and picked out a pair of closefitting Givenchy pants and a $3,500 black vest from Viktor & Rolf. The vest was bursting with tulle ruffles and was cinched tight at the waist. Taslitz now looked like an exotic bird that had flown back from the future. “It’s more of an art piece. Instead of a strapless, this is the story you should be telling,” Goldman told her.

Goldman will refuse to sell a piece if she thinks it does not flatter the customer, but if she believes in the look, she makes sure that garment sells. Irini Arakas, the designer behind Prova, recalls watching Goldman dress women in the loose, silky print tanks and pants Arakas was designing at the time. The tanks were not working on one woman who admired the line, so Goldman took a second pair of Prova pants and tucked the elastic waist into the top of the pants the woman was wearing, crisscrossing the legs of the second pair and wrapping them up and around the woman’s torso. Now the pants were a shirt. “And the woman wasn’t like, ‘What are you doing, this is insane,’ ” Arakas said. “She was completely in her hands. She will be running around Chicago wearing a Prova pant as a top. It blew my mind.”

Goldman has created an environment where designers’ most aspirational work seems wearable. “She’ll buy the statement pieces, the most dramatic pieces, for $15,000, or $20,000, and she’ll sell them,” says Brian Phillips, the founder of Black Frame, a fashion public-relations firm that represents Rodarte, whose dresses are sometimes priced in that range, and which Ikram carries. Phillips estimated that Ikram was one of only maybe 15 stores, globally, to make those kinds of purchases. “The media wants the exciting, directional pieces, and so do the fashion fans. But not the stores. They’re afraid to make that kind of investment. If there’s no Ikram, that forces designers to make less-interesting pieces — the runway would get more and more generic.”

Even a small buy from Ikram goes a long way for designers. “A lot of designers would rather have Ikram buy 5 of their dresses than have a department store buy 50,” says Brian Bolke, the owner of Forty Five Ten, a prestigious luxury boutique in Dallas. “Because Ikram says, ‘I’m going to love them, I’m going to put them on the most amazing women.’ Whereas those dresses in the department store? Maybe the salespeople didn’t push them.” When clothing goes unsold or ends up on the sales rack, it can broadcast failure for designers. It can also cost them money. The store might ask a designer to buy back what it did not sell or to accept a smaller cut of the profits.

“Department stores can’t give them what we give them,” Goldman said. With a steady stream of parties and trunk shows, Goldman forges connections between her clients and designers. At a recent dinner for Viktor & Rolf, Goldman belted out karaoke with the designers (Abba’s “Dancing Queen”) to the accompaniment of a live band. Among the attendees: Desirée Rogers, the former social secretary to President Obama.

For her most loyal clients, who might spend $40,000 in one visit, Goldman archives their wardrobes in individual look books. She will also call in favors from designers for costly rush orders or special design elements. In exchange, she holds those clients to a certain standard. “She knows people know that we wear her clothes, so she’s very particular about how we look,” says Mellody Hobson, a close friend and longstanding client, who is president of Ariel Investments (and engaged to the director George Lucas). “One time I came into the store wearing a Chrome Hearts hoodie and some sweat pants, and she was like, ‘Give me those clothes right now,’ and she made me put on a pair of khakis and a T-shirt. She said she would send them back, but she gave them to her niece! I was like, ‘Ikram, you stole my clothes!’ And she was like, ‘I don’t ever want to see you in that again on the street.’ ”

Goldman was not born into fashion. She spent most of her childhood in Israel, the youngest of nine children in a Christian Arab home. She moved, along with her mother and one older brother, to Chicago when she was 13; two years later her mother died of breast cancer. Goldman (then Saman) briefly moved to New York with her brother but did not last long. “Too lonely,” she said.

They returned to Chicago, and Goldman, then 16, dropped out of high school and started working at a clothing store, eventually landing a job at Ultimo, a legendary Chicago boutique. Goldman was already a star saleswoman when, at 25, she met Josh Goldman, a Princeton-educated lawyer and the son of prominent Chicago art collectors, whom she later married. As Ultimo’s founder, Joan Weinstein, phased out of the business, Goldman and her husband opened their own store and hired Weinstein as a consultant.

Goldman quickly developed a reputation as an advocate of young designers. She sells other industry insiders on their work with what one editor called “that breathless voice of utter excitement.” And she coaches young talent with the same zeal. Long before she was dressing Michelle Obama in Thakoon, Goldman was encouraging Thakoon Panichgul, then an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, to take a more ambitious approach to the business. (Panichgul had been considering T-shirts, but, he recalled, Goldman “wasn’t into it.”) And when his business attracted notice, Goldman called Maria Borromeo, a young fashion-business consultant, and told her to turn to a page in Vogue that featured Panichgul’s work: “I’m about to make a match made in heaven,” Goldman told Borromeo, who has been Panichgul’s business partner ever since. Other designers have similar stories. Shane Gabier, a partner at Creatures of the Wind, met Goldman while working as an assistant at Ikram. Years later, he showed her the designs he and his partner had created. She offered feedback; when she thought the collection finally worked, she called every fashion editor she knew — she counts Mark Holgate and Sally Singer of Vogue among her closest friends — and urged that they attend the designers’ first show in New York. Since then, Creatures of the Wind was named runner-up for the coveted CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award, earning, among other things, a chance to collaborate with J. Crew.

For her assistance, Goldman demands a high degree of loyalty. Sometimes the request is for exclusivity for a given garment; often it is for an accommodation that reflects faith in her judgment. At the showroom of Maria Cornejo, the designer behind the line Zero + Maria Cornejo, Goldman invested heavily in the collection but was unhappy with all the pants Cornejo showed her to go with a black jacquard jacket; she wanted a wider leg — like the pants they sold several seasons ago. For Cornejo, that meant going back to the factory and asking it to produce its minimum number — in this case, 40 pants — even though Goldman would most likely buy only 5. Cornejo would comply, of course. “You’ll see,” Goldman told her. “It’ll end up with you selling it and loving it.”

Goldman’s embrace of a friend in the business can be warm and generous, but it is not indulgent — and she does not give young designers financial breaks, she later made clear. “I am not handing you charity work,” she said. “You are creative. You are smart. You are young. There is an abundance of talent in New York — go show the world what you can do. I am not going to hold your hand doing it. I refuse.” Goldman is a relentless cheerleader, but she conveys the sense that her support, in the event of a misstep, could readily be lost. “When a designer tells me no, they can’t do it, they don’t have the fabric, I go crazy,” she said. “Figure it out!”

A few years ago, a saleswoman called Goldman one day with what she thought was good news: She had sold a $17,000 piece by Yohji Yamamoto, a long, white backless shirt trimmed with lace. Goldman, in Europe at the time, was devastated: it was one of only three that had been made, and she’d intended it for her own off-site archive, which includes rare items from Alexander McQueen and Givenchy. “I’m in tears, crying,” Goldman said, recalling the incident. “The salesperson was saying, ‘Shouldn’t you be happy?’ But how often do you find a Van Gogh or a Richard Serra? I loved it. I loved it so much. It’s so wrong — it hurts.” At first she wanted to ask the client to return the shirt. Then she asked someone at Yamamoto to send her the one from their stores. It could not be done. “I had to go all the way to the top,” Goldman said, her eyes teary. The shirt was eventually manufactured especially for her.

Goldman treats the designers she admires as rare artists, somehow conveying adulation alongside her own considerable need for respect. The day before Goldman left to fly home to Chicago, she finished her day at the Manhattan showroom of Narciso Rodriguez. Within moments, she was wide-eyed, holding up a high-heeled shoe. “They’re the most beautiful,” she said. Rodriguez flushed with pleasure. “You know I put so much energy into these,” he said, “obsessing over the line. When you work so hard and something ends up canceled because not enough people buy it — and then someone comes in and appreciates those small things, you’re just very appreciative that someone noticed.”

Like so many designers, Rodriguez was eager to give Goldman credit: it was Ikram who advised him to expand his line of knitwear. And she was the only buyer to purchase a dress he showed on the runway with a special kind of hand embroidery, a piece that cost around $8,500. “Did it sell?” Rodriguez asked Goldman. “Oh, God, yes,” she said. “She wore it to Buckingham Palace.”

Goldman moved across the room to inspect the season’s clothing. It was the end of the week. Perhaps she had run out of words, because when she saw a piece she liked, she simply groaned in pleasure or grunted several times. She gave some carefully tailored leather dresses her highest praise: “Yumma, lumma.”

Even for someone at Rodriguez’s level, the business entails a certain amount of heartbreak. He estimated that close to 15 percent of his line would not be produced this season; there aren’t enough buyers for certain items to justify the cost of their production. This means that the one or two buyers who wanted the most specialized runway pieces will probably be disappointed. Unless, of course, the buyer is Goldman.

Does he usually find a way to give Goldman what she wants? Rodriguez looked at his sales director, who nodded in agreement. “For Ikram,” Rodriguez said, “if we can, we will.”