Why Rebecca Moses is in the Design 100

Rebecca Moses built her first career in fashion, long before she picked up an illustrator’s pen. She ran her own New York label, then moved to Italy in the early 1990s to take over from Gianni Versace as designer for Donatella Girombelli’s Genny label — a rare foothold for an American designer in that world. A signature label of her own followed in 1996, carried by Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Barneys New York and Harvey Nichols.

Returning to New York in 2010, she turned the same eye toward paper, drawing for Vogue Italia and other titles and developing a distinct, watercolour-led language for the fashionable woman. That vocabulary caught the attention of Ralph Pucci, whose company translated her illustrated figures into a line of mannequins and has since given her gallery space of her own — proof that a career built on dressing women convincingly can be redrawn, quite literally, without losing its voice.