Carol Herman, who along with her husband Ron defined California cool via their signature stores, died May 11.
Herman, who was 76, died of multiple system atrophy, a form of Parkinson’s disease, at her home in Los Angeles, according to her daughter Jane. A private memorial is being planned.
Born Carol Rivers, she was raised in Pittsburgh with a brother Richard and sister Patty. As a student at Ohio Wesleyan University, she spent her senior year studying fine art abroad in Rome. She then returned to her hometown, but soon decided to relocate to Los Angeles and found a small apartment there. In 1975, Herman walked into what was then the Fred Segal store on Melrose Avenue, applied for a job and was hired.
Ron Herman, who was also working in the Fred Segal store at that time, said Tuesday that he did not personally hire her, but he quickly became aware of her. In March 1976, the couple wed, and Ron Herman approached Segal about buying the boutique, and so they did — all in the same month.
Located on a busy corner at 8100 Melrose Avenue, the ivy-covered Ron Herman store became known for stocking up-and-coming fashion labels, many of them born and bred in Southern California, and showcasing trendy brands no one else had. The retailer was also a pioneer in introducing premium denim to the masses.
Through the years, a slew of shoppers that included everyone from James Brown to Jennifer Aniston walked through its doors, browsing for board shorts alongside cutting-edge Japanese designers. It was also once the must-see place that influential fashion types like Jenna Lyons and Mickey Drexler used to stop by when they came to L.A. — to check out what was new.
As a buyer and owner of the family’s stores, Herman was a familiar face on the sales floor in the Brentwood stores, and she was instrumental to the company’s success. That outpost debuted in 1988. In its prime, Ron Herman had locations in Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Melrose, Malibu, in Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza and in Las Vegas
Herman’s style — aesthetically and personally — was inspirational to shoppers, staffers and family members, according to her husband.
“The style that Carol had was the style that she always had, and it was expressed not only through her, but through her business. The people who worked for her knew the style and the store, the product and the presentation reflected that personal style,” Ron Herman said. “Nothing was contrived. What you saw with Carol was exactly who she was both in her personal life and her business.”
Shoulder-to-shoulder, Herman and her husband of 50 years moved through fashion’s many incarnations across the decades harmoniously and in sync. With a consistent style that was innate, not invented, Herman inspired many Ron Herman shoppers with their own fashion choices.
Along with premium denim, which was Ron Herman’s forte, T-shirts became a primary category for the retailer, thanks to Carol Herman. Her concept for a genre of clothing that would coordinate with jeans and was simply called “T-shirt” was prompted by a casual conversation the couple had one morning after a tennis match and before the stores opened. Ron Herman recalled Tuesday, “Her idea was, ‘Why don’t we just call it ‘T-shirt? Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Well, what does T-shirt mean?’ She said, ‘T-shirt is just a feeling. We will create the whole thing around the feeling of T-shirts.’”
Carol Herman bought for the contemporary departments of her husband Ron’s four namesake stores in Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Malibu and on Melrose. In 2012, she told WWD that if something looks right to their “serious customers,” she will buy it. “It’s L.A. and we have tourists so that helps us. Our market is truly very deep. We’re deep in product,” she said.
Always “very buttoned-up, pulled together and polished,” Herman favored a uniform, so to speak, that consisted of pants, a buttoned-up shirt, a tailored jacket, a nice belt, and shoes and a bag that coordinated with her look without being too matchy, Jane Herman said. “To have a mother who never wavered in that way was very reassuring to me. She was an excellent model of how to navigate and assert yourself in the world through the way that you dress.”
That sense of style extended to the family’s home, its decor, their lifestyle, travels, accommodations and beyond, which created a connectedness, according to Ron Herman. “Carol helped to create that for all of us and also for the people, who worked for her and in the stores too,” he said.
Her own of-the-moment style was something that many Ron Herman shoppers sought to emulate. “She was an important part of its heyday and the quiet force behind my father’s vision. They were married for 50 years and worked together as a team even longer than that,” Jane Herman said.
During the economic downturn in 2008, Ron Herman entered into a joint venture in Japan and introduced its first store there in 2009. A decade later, after celebrating the company’s 10-year anniversary in Japan, the Ron Herman business was taken over by the Tokyo-based Sazaby League Ltd.
In December 2023, Ron Herman shuttered its last store in California to focus on digital, after 45 years of defining “California cool” with its wide-ranging assortment of sportswear and accessories.
First and foremost, Carol Herman would want to be remembered as a mother, as well as an inspiration to the fashion world, and a person who offered opportunity for other creatives, Ron Herman said.
In addition to her husband and daughter Jane, Herman is survived by her two other daughters Chrissy and Kim, as well as her brother Richard Rivers and sister Patty Caplan.
