BY | BETH HAWKINS

Near the end of third grade, at the height of her Shirley Temple phase, Stephanie Day Iverson ’96 moved from Houston to Minnetonka. Her grandfather, K.G. Iverson, was president of the now-defunct Donaldson’s department store empire, and the family favored suits and elaborate Easter costumes. Day Iverson, now Stephanie Lake, had never worn jeans, only dresses. It was March, and Lake was excited to have somewhere cold to wear her Neiman Marcus fur coat, a hooded number with pom-poms that tied under the chin. But as the only kid on the playground not wearing ripstop nylon, “Of course, I got teased,” she recalls.

The next show-stopping coat came into Lake’s life when she was 25. With her art history degree from Macalester complete, she was enrolled at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the History of Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC) and working in the newly created fashion department at Sotheby’s. There she evaluated potential consignments and helped organize auctions with cheeky themes, including “Cocktails,” “Pulp Fashion,” and “Nothing to Wear.”

The coat in question hung on the wall, its hem brushing Lake’s desk. Long, made of turquoise leather, and encircled by oversized “paperback” pockets for carrying books, it was designed in 1974—“a year and a spring collection after I was born,” Lake would later write, by a designer named Bonnie Cashin.

A prolific ready-to-wear designer, Cashin had retired in 1985, but her influence was still felt throughout the fashion world. Indeed, though the coat was a quarter of a century old, it wasn’t the least bit dated. On the contrary, its simplicity and elegance seemed contemporary and fresh. “Every season I see things that are copied right out of her collections,” says Lake. “They’re modernist staples.” In 1937, Cashin was working as a Broadway costume designer when she was discovered by the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. She arranged for Cashin to be named chief ready-to-wear designer for the prestigious coat and suit manufacturer Adler & Adler. Design contracts followed with virtually every major department store and numerous clothing and accessory manufacturers, including Lord & Taylor, Neiman Marcus, and Macy’s. Cashin also was Coach’s first handbag designer; the company’s signature toggle closures were inspired by hardware on the roof of her convertible.

After World War II, Cashin opened her own design studio and began traveling widely. Her adventures sparked her to borrow silhouettes she saw on her journeys, such as the poncho, the kimono, and the Noh jacket. Frustrated by how fussy and constrictive most women’s fashions were, Cashin designed the clothes she wanted to wear— elegant, chic, practical things for active women. “They cross boundaries and lifestyles,” says Lake. “You know a Cashin garment not because of a label, but because it’s so distinctive. From her collections over 40 years, you can mix and match pieces.”

Lake was happy enough researching the provenance of the vintage clothes at Sotheby’s auctions, but she was awestruck by the marriage of style and functionality she saw in the Cashin coat. “Couture dresses would come in and they were so over the top. We’d hold them up and imagine playing dress-up,” she recalls, bemused. “But the Cashin coat—I didn’t want to do that with it. It was so relevant you couldn’t tease about it that way. It was really just an enchanting thing.”

Lake had considered writing her master’s thesis about her grandfather. But as she researched the items in the Cashin auction, she realized that no one had ever chronicled the designer’s life. Shortly afterward, in 1998, a friend of a friend who worked as an editor at Harper’s Bazaar placed a call to Cashin, who invited Lake to tea at her United Nations Plaza apartment.

Cashin could be prickly. “Lots of people had tried to write about her,” says Lake. “She could be very critical and dismissive. But if she respected you, she could be sweet and generous.” Lake had done her homework, though, and Cashin was charmed. After two hours of conversation, neither woman wanted to say goodbye. “The elevator would open and close and we were still talking,” Lake recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh, my thesis is going to be fabulous, because I’ve actually met her!’”

Lake may have found her thesis topic, but Cashin had found her heir apparent. She offered Lake exclusive, unlimited access to the scrapbooks, clothing, swatches, and other items that made up her life’s work, all of which was housed in a separate apartment in her building. Over the next few years, Lake spent many days there, poring over Cashin’s high school sketches of costumes and letters home from her world travels.

Often Cashin would pop down to talk as Lake worked, and the two discovered they had many things in common. Convinced that every woman should have a boutique in her home, Cashin had lined entire walls with folded garments. Mesmerized by collages of color and texture, Lake, too, kept her clothes on display. Both did their best work on their own, following their instincts.

And both were fearless, a trait that was apparent in each early on. At Macalester, Lake had written her senior honors project about Czech-Canadian artist Jana Sterbak, then relatively unknown but now infamous for having created a dress out of meat. Lake tracked down Sterbak and interviewed her—in French. “I remember being impressed that an undergraduate would do that,” says Ruthann Godollei, chair of Macalester’s Art Department. “Stephanie was doing graduate-level work as an undergrad. It’s a pleasure to be around someone like that.”

For her part, Lake loved the freedom she had as a student at Macalester. Her professors “really did foster my creativity as an individual, my right to go out on a limb, to not be told what to think about,” she says. “I was able to go off the syllabus and do stuff that inspired me.” Underlying Lake’s love of fashion was a keen curiosity about the intersection between culture and design. “I’ve always been fascinated by issues of identity,” she says. “The objects with which we surround ourselves and what we put on our bodies are the first layer of that.”

Cashin died in 2000 at the age of 92, leaving a two-paragraph will. Lake inherited her clothes. More significantly, the executors of Cashin’s estate asked Lake to decide what belonged in Cashin’s design archive. At Lake’s urging, a foundation was created that would retain the rights to her collections and serve as a resource.

After “secret-shopping” several museums, Lake selected the Library of Special Collections at the University of California–Los Angeles as a permanent home for the archive. She was living in Los Angeles four years ago, organizing Cashin’s papers, when she got a call from the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Museum of Design. The museum’s first exhibit had been a Cashin retrospective and its curators wanted to mark the institution’s 25th anniversary with another Cashin show. (The Goldstein Museum owns several Cashin designs.)

The Goldstein call brought Lake to the Twin Cities, and on the last day of her visit, she looked up a high school pal named Cory Lake. The owner of a St. Paul store that specialized in rare, handmade guitars, he had his own passion for functional design. By the end of the evening, each confessed to having long nursed a secret crush on the other. They married soon after. When Lake moved back to Minnesota a year and a half ago, she bought herself a Valentino black fox jacket as a homecoming present. Cashin’s clothes now occupy a large, specially outfitted and climate-controlled room in the Lakes’ Minnetonka house. Because she and Cashin were almost the same size, Lake can—and does—wear most of the items, including one-of-a-kind pieces Cashin designed for herself. “There are several hundred coats, hundreds of cashmere garments, 150 or more handbags, a hundred pairs of gloves, umbrellas, tote bags,” Lake says. “Living here, I have a lot more opportunities to wear them than I did in L.A.”

In addition to serving as creative director of the Cashin Foundation, which is headquartered in Manhattan, Lake is finishing her Ph.D. at the BGC. Her master’s thesis chronicled the years before the designer became a name; her dissertation analyzes how Cashin “created her persona and crafted her inimitable aesthetic within the fashion industry.” Lake is also working on a book based on the same research; when it’s finished she’ll shop for a publisher. In the meantime, Lake has turned her professional eye to new targets. She recently helped her husband design their Maple Grove store called American Guitar & Band, and she curated a photographic history of the local music scene to decorate it.

She’s cautiously seeking a manufacturer to reissue Cashin’s designs, and is always open to exhibit proposals. (The Cashin Foundation website, www.bonniecashinfoundation.org, has online exhibits and other information, including a timeline of the designer’s life and career.)

As for the turquoise coat, it belongs to Lake, too, though not by inheritance. As luck would have it, the coat didn’t sell at auction so Lake’s boss at Sotheby’s bought it for her. She wore it to that first, life-changing meeting with Cashin. And wears it still.

BETH HAWKINS is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis.