Worth a Glam

Renee Cafaro, ’03, has wanted to work in fashion for as long as she can remember. “I think I was probably sketching dresses since the time I could finger paint,” she says. As a girl, she was captivated by “the glamour, the persona that people can have through fashion” in vintage movies like Funny Face and The Philadelphia Story—inspired, she quips, by both Hepburns, Audrey and Katharine. But “as I became a teenager,” she says, “it was made clear to me by a lot of people in my life—and they might’ve been right back in the heroin-chic ’90s—that there was kind of no place for the fat girl in fashion.”

Cafaro’s conclusion: “I can’t be the fashionable girl, but I can be the smart girl.” So she went to Stanford, then put her political science education to use working on the 2004 congressional campaign of her sister, Capri, ’96 (later an Ohio state senator), as well as for a health care labor union and in New York City government.

‘Body confidence is a journey, not a destination.’

Still, the problem remained. Cafaro loved fashion, and it didn’t love her back. When Eliot Spitzer resigned the governorship of New York in 2008, she was offered a position overnight as a member of incoming governor David Paterson’s senior advisers unit. Cafaro had to suit up. “Do you know how hard that is on the fly?” she asks. “People say clichés like ‘Dress for the job you want.’ And there’s no real equitability for people in bigger bodies. I can’t dress for the job I want.” So she went to a local Target to cobble together cardigans and slacks, doing the best she could to muster professional attire in wardrobe-conscious Albany. “I cried in the dressing room,” she says.

Cafaro also found herself frustrated while on vacation in Europe in 2009, grappling with a strapless bra that took up half of her suitcase. It was time, she thought, for a game-changer: a dress that had a built-in bra—a supportive underwire, not a flimsy elastic band—as well as an adjustable hemline to adapt to heat or formality as needed, and, for fun, a flexible neckline that could be worn four ways. Over the next five years, she started reacquainting herself with her creative side, interspersing fashion and travel writing with her work on campaigns. In 2016, Cafaro became the U.S. editor of plus-size-focused Slink magazine. When it paused publication during the pandemic, she finally had time to design that dress she’d dreamed up. “I’m just cutting up random stuff, taking old bras, getting underwire, Frankensteining this thing,” she says. 

‘We have enough jeans.  I don’t need to make jeans. I want to make the things that don’t exist in the world.’

The Game Changer—with patented bra—now retails for $199 to $225 at RCA Public Label, one of two fashion brands Cafaro has founded in the past five years. Its parent company is Renee Cafaro Atelier, which makes custom couture. Cafaro’s designs have been featured on the runways at Paris, London, and New York fashion weeks, and she dressed Melanie Miller, a member of the Oscar-winning producing team of the documentary Navalny, for the 2023 Academy Awards. 

It might sound super-glamorous, but Cafaro spends most of her days with a coterie of freelancers—pattern makers, fit models, sewists—in and around the Garment District in Manhattan. She relishes the rare opportunity to don her own designs. “I love this dress!” she exclaims as she emerges for a photo shoot in a black silk gown embellished with gold petals attached by hand (see previous page). “To be able to be a size 20 and feel like this—I like feeling it in all of the senses of that word. I’m feeling dressed; I’m also feeling the dress—that feeling of the slinky silk on your body. When the industry has relegated me to petroleum products and scratchy online fabrics and spandex for my whole life, it is really nice to feel special, feel expensive, and invest in yourself.”

—Kathy Zonana, ’93, JD ’96