THE WOMAN WHO DESIGNS FOR YOUR INSECURITIES

Shani Grosz was a girl in a Modern Orthodox house in Suffern, New York, who took kitchen scissors to brand new dresses because she could see what they should have been. Her parents were South American, her upbringing observant, her instincts entirely her own. She went to Parsons, then apprenticed inside the ateliers of Seventh Avenue, learning the unglamorous mechanics of how a dress is actually engineered before she put her name on one. The pitch that started the company has become a small piece of industry folklore. She told a prospective employer she would work for him only if he financed her own label alongside it. He said yes within twenty four hours. Twenty years on, SHANI is a house with real architecture behind it. There is the main line, sold at Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom. There is Nue by Shani, which pioneered shapewear built invisibly into the dress itself, a technique she markets, with a straight face and a very good ear, as Botox for the body. There is Focus by Shani at Kohl's. There is a fine jewelry line. The direct collection runs roughly three hundred and thirty six to six hundred dollars, which places her in the precise sweet spot where a dress is an investment rather than an event. The clothes themselves are built on color blocking and tailoring rather than volume. Laser cut ponte. Appliqued embroidery. Swarovski crystals, feathers, beading, sequins, deployed with the discipline of someone who knows the difference between decoration and structure. She sources fabric globally and tests it herself for stretch, comfort and how it behaves on the eleventh wearing rather than the first. Black and white are year round. After black, royal blue outsells everything. And then there is the thing that makes her the right designer to open a Jewish runway: length and sleeves. Not as a concession, not as a category, but as a design position she has held for two decades. Her dresses are worn to shul and to galas by the same women in the same week, layered over a shell or leggings when the occasion calls for it, and she designs them knowing that. "Everyone has a part of their body that they may be a bit insecure about showing to the world," she told Social Life Magazine. "We design for those insecurities." It is a philosophy that sits deliberately against the current. "I design classic fashion, made well, not fast fashion which is one season and out," she told the Jewish Link. "As much as my brand stands for fashion, it's realistic fashion." Where the dresses have been seen is its own argument. Her core clientele is women who are looked at professionally and repeatedly: television anchors, reporters, meteorologists, Broadway performers, politicians. She has been a recurring designer on NBC's Ambush Makeover and has appeared on Good Morning America and with Kathie Lee and Hoda. Wardrobe credits run through General Hospital, Mob Wives and Sex and the City. The New York Times photographed her at Pol