Eileen Fisher

Clothing Designer and Entrepreneur

"You don't have to be afraid of living alone."

   You only have to lay your eyes on Eileen Fisher's elegantly understated clothing to understand her talent for paring away the unessential. Now 55, presiding over one of the largest privately-held female-owned businesses in the country, she makes simplicity look sophisticated and the unadorned seem richly embellished.

    When she greeted me at the door of her house in Irvington, NY, her company's home base, Eileen was the embodiment of this sensual purity. Her hair is uncolored, but it's such a spectacular shade of white that you instantly consider forsaking L'Oreal. She moves like the yoga devotee she is-calmly and with pleasure. She runs a large company in the fashion industry but ignores trends in favor of designs that reflect her personal values. When the teen-aged Eileen and her five sisters madly primped in front of a mirror before going out, their mother used to chide them, saying, "Nobody is going to be looking at you." Now primping seems unnecessary and many people watch her.

    Her employee-focused management style has won acclaim from Fortune Small Business, Working Woman, and Great Place to Work Institute. Eileen shares 10 percent of pretax profits with her 600 employees, gives each $2000 annually to spend on education and wellness, and hosts free classes in yoga, tai chi, dance movement and stress reduction. The company, with $177 million in sales in 2004, is also in the vanguard of social responsibility, paying close attention to the conditions of factory workers overseas who produce her clothing. It is one of the few in the U.S. to meet workplace standards set by Social Accountability International, a not-for-profit watchdog group in New York City.

    As we talked, Eileen showed me her journal, which is filled with beautiful black lettering: long musings, stray words, quotes and drawings. She is a seeker and has found journaling, meditation and yoga all help her reach that well of peace within herself. In the letter below, written to herself in her early 20s, she had no such resources. During that period she worked for a graphic designer who became her boyfriend. Living with him in a dark SoHo loft in New York City, Eileen felt trapped in a narrow existence that had no way out. "I think it's the most lost I've ever been. Everything was hard. I felt depressed a lot of the time," she recalls.

    One by one, her friends had fallen away because her boyfriend didn't like them. She couldn't turn to her family because her parents disapproved of their living arrangements. What's more, having boldly fulfilled a longstanding ambition by moving to New York from her home in Chicago, she didn't want to reveal herself as anything other than the strong and independent person she had always presented to the world.

Dear Eileen,

    I see you in the kitchen, the only real room in that murky loft. You're there because you're trying to make space for yourself as a distinct person. You feel so negated, so erased away that you're looking for a corner to call your own. But here's what you don't know: The space you're searching for isn't physical. You need psychological space. You need to know that you can be alone-that you should be alone-but you're afraid to be.

    Why are you so scared? You feel you have to have a boyfriend. Without one, you feel incomplete. When you have one, you feel defined as a person. But, Eileen, that's a trap.

    What I can see, almost thirty years later, is that you need time with yourself, not a friend or a beau, to figure out what your thoughts and feelings are. When you sit with yourself alone, you can't ignore them. They come screeching at you. The only way to the other side is through it. You may have to go through pain, but on the other side is the good stuff. You don't have to be afraid of living alone.

    I feel so sad to think of what will happen if you don't learn this huge lesson. You'll lose pieces of yourself along the road. You know how much you love to dance? You've danced for the fun of it from the time you were tiny. You went dancing with your boyfriend in college and rocked out with friends in your college dorm. All that joy is going to fall away because you're going to stop dancing for 20 years-unless you take care to listen to yourself and shepherd all the pieces of who you are through to the future.

    Meditation has become the best way I know to listen to myself. The gift I give you are the words I often say when I begin to meditate:

    Stillness is the ground of being from which all else emerges. It is within and behind every breath, every thought, every action. It is my starting point, my resting place, the home base to which I can return again and again.

    In stillness I notice how time and space disappear. All there is is the present moment and my willingness to listen….to allow the stillness to speak.

    The stillness takes me into a realm of conscious awareness that transcends my identity as body or mind. Stillness offers an experience of being and a recognition that my being…my essence…is a part of all Being, all Essence.

(from Meditation and Rituals for Conscious Living by Nancy J. Napier and Carolyn Tricomi)

With compassion,
Eileen