Hilary Rosenman

And then the magazine finally folded, and my friend Charlotte Ronson was starting her line, and I went to help her, ended up staying with her, working with her for four years, and we grew the business. I learned everything about being an entrepreneur, I loved what we were doing with the clothes. And then we started getting into shoes, sort of doing small capsule collections, just with the clothes. I just loved that part of the business. I just loved designing.  I loved the way that the stores reacted to the shoes. I also noticed that there just weren’t that many cool shoes out there at the price we were offering, so after about four years, I really wanted to start a shoe line.  My [college] friend Barri [Budin]... and I were talking one day.  And we both had this love for vintage - a very similar aesthetic was what had bonded us together in college - and we both had this great vintage collection of shoes and clothes and she and I were saying, “Wouldn’t it be so great if we could buy shoes that we could afford?”  We were buying a lot of vintage shoes because... the cool shoes were were totally out of our price range. So we had this idea to start this line!  We used that and we used our aesthetic that we had gained over the years - the vintage aesthetic - and we started Madison Harding. And Madison is the street that I grew up on, and Harding is the street that [Barri] grew up on in New Jersey. And I grew up in Manhattan. [Photo via]
2 of 8

The Guest List

More