Liza Vassell and the Art of Saying Yes

Liza Vassell wanted a library of shoes. In her Los Angeles showroom, the idea became a wall she described as 65 feet long and 16 feet high. Two contractors backed out before a third completed it. Fashion has plenty of difficult customers; apparently, it also has difficult shelving.

The detail suits a founder whose career has involved choosing what deserves a place in the room. Vassell established Brooklyn PR in 2012 after working in European fashion. Its name carries her Brooklyn beginnings into Los Angeles, while its business draws on experience acquired across the Atlantic.

There are several ways to enter her story: through a fashion house, a handbag, a stylist’s request, or a dinner party. Follow any of them far enough and the same question appears. What happens when a person with an eye for something decides to act on it?

Brooklyn, by way of Italy

Vassell was born in Brooklyn. Her fashion career took her to Europe, where she worked as a model and developed experience in marketing and creative direction. Elie Saab, Gianfranco Ferré and Giorgio Armani appear in that professional history. Those names describe a working education in how fashion is made, presented and understood.

The progression matters because public relations depends on knowing more than the finished photograph. Someone has to understand the product, the audience and the context in which the two might meet. A career spent around fashion houses offers a different starting point from a career spent describing them from a distance.

Her own account of working with Elie Saab turns on an answered telephone call. She agreed to help when he was still an unfamiliar name. The episode stayed with her as an example of trusting her judgment.

“I never follow what others do; I do what’s right to me.”

Liza A. Vassell

There is a practical difficulty inside that conviction. An established name arrives with evidence that other people already approve. An unfamiliar one asks you to make a decision before that reassurance exists. The interesting part of her recollection is the willingness to accept responsibility for the choice.

Before the showroom, the Boat Bag

By April 2008, Vassell had a product story of her own. Her accessories label GhettoFab, also styled G.Fab, was being introduced to customers by German retailer TakaTomo.de. Its identity linked a Brooklyn origin with Italian manufacture. She had lived in Europe since 1985, mainly in Milan.

The collection’s theme was travel. Its Boat Bag, also called the A-Bag, came in two sizes and six colors. A larger version was intended for outings such as the beach or a boat trip; the smaller one could accompany a day or evening in the city. Friends had encouraged her to create a collection after years in fashion.

These are useful, ordinary details: sizes, colors, intended uses. They put an actual object into a biography that might otherwise dissolve into famous names. Before there was a Los Angeles agency to introduce other people’s designs, there was a designer making decisions about her own.

That experience offers one way to read the later work. Representing a product means translating choices someone has already made. Designing it means making those choices yourself. Vassell’s career contains both perspectives, along with the awkward fact that an attractive bag still needs somebody to carry it.

The mustard-colored suit

In 2014, designers Juan Carlos Fernández and Antonio Burillo explained why their label, The 2nd Skin Co., had begun working with Vassell. They were building an international business. Recognition from dressing celebrities in Spain did not necessarily carry the same meaning for their overseas customers. Los Angeles offered another point of connection.

They described Brooklyn PR as the showroom and communications operation run by Vassell, whom they had met after her return to the United States. They also pointed to a result: Jennifer Lopez had worn one of their mustard-colored suits.

It is a more revealing example than a long roll call of celebrities. The designers described a particular problem, a working relationship and a garment that reached a public audience. A suit had to leave the collection and acquire a life beyond it. The account makes Vassell’s role in that journey concrete.

It also shows why international experience can be useful in such work. A label may have a clear identity at home while still needing an introduction elsewhere. The clothes do not change at the border. The people who recognize them, and the associations those people bring, do.

A photograph has a long prehistory

Brooklyn PR’s portfolio includes images identified with Zendaya, Dua Lipa, Tom Holland, Jenna Ortega, Alicia Keys and other performers. For the viewer, the photograph is an instant. For a fashion business, it raises a longer set of questions about selection, presentation and the route by which an object reaches that moment.

The agency’s services help explain the breadth of Vassell’s working world. Market research and consumer insights sit alongside brand partnerships and product launches. Communications work includes media relations, digital campaigns and international showroom partnerships. Events involve creative direction and production, as well as styling, guest lists, vendors and logistics.

There is something pleasingly unromantic about that last group. A guest list will not fasten itself. Creative work still requires arrangements, and arrangements require somebody to make them. The service list gives the glamorous photograph its necessary company: planning, coordination and a great many decisions that the viewer never needs to see.

Ask her what she thinks

Stylist Gabriel Langenbrunner supplied a different view of Vassell at work. Waiting for items to be checked out at Brooklyn PR, he asked what she thought of his work. He remembered having a difficult day and struggling to obtain pieces for a client. Her opinion mattered enough for him to ask.

He described her as someone who would be direct. In his words, she was “not going to hold back.” He valued the candor. The scene is small, but it gives the professional relationship a texture that a list of placements cannot provide: somebody waiting, somebody asking, somebody prepared to answer.

Fashion advice can be flattering and therefore useless. A clear assessment offers the possibility of doing something differently. In Langenbrunner’s account, Vassell’s directness was part of her value to a developing stylist. His willingness to seek it suggests a relationship built around more than borrowing clothes.

Vassell has also used the phrase “teaching showroom” in a public internship invitation. She published an internship invitation on September 9, 2015, and has continued recruiting people interested in practical fashion PR experience. Teaching appears as something connected to the daily business, where practical experience can accompany the work itself.

Her Liza Vassell Foundation extends that interest to mentoring emerging talent in public relations, fashion, marketing and the creative industries. Access is a stated concern. The ambition gives another purpose to a career spent learning how introductions happen: helping people make an introduction of their own.

A dinner party becomes a business

Then there is the table. Vassell’s lifestyle and home decor platform Eyeoba grew from her enthusiasm for hosting gatherings with art, glassware and wine collected during years of travel. The account changes the setting from a showroom to a home, while keeping the attention on how objects create an experience.

Eyeoba curates and presents brands from around the world. Vassell’s introduction describes an appreciation for details that make a house feel like a home. Her phrase “Born in Brooklyn, and culturally raised in Europe” offers a compact account of the experience behind those selections.

A dinner party is a useful setting for that sensibility. A glass is an object to look at and something a guest will use. Art shares the room with conversation. The host’s choices become part of somebody else’s evening, which is a demanding little test of whether those choices work together.

Seen alongside GhettoFab and Brooklyn PR, Eyeoba adds a domestic chapter to a career concerned with presentation. The scale changes from an international brand to an object on a table. The task of choosing remains. What deserves attention, and how should somebody encounter it?

Room for the next introduction

Vassell’s professional life has room for both instinct and organization. Her account of the Elie Saab call emphasizes judgment; her agency’s services describe the systems needed to carry a decision through. The two belong together. An introduction is only the beginning of the work.

The same is true of mentoring. Offering access is a start. Helping somebody understand what to do with it asks for time, practical experience and the occasional frank answer. The founder’s projects place those concerns alongside the commercial business of helping brands find an audience.

Back at the shoe wall, there is an appealing physical expression of all this choosing. A collection needs somewhere to be seen. An idea needs someone willing to build it. And if the first two contractors decline, it may be necessary to make another introduction.