{"id":103557,"date":"2025-12-29T12:18:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T12:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/103557\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T12:18:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T12:18:08","slug":"carla-rockmore-went-from-dallas-carpool-mom-to-fashion-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/103557\/","title":{"rendered":"Carla Rockmore went from Dallas carpool mom to fashion force"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carla Rockmore has 1.3 million followers on TikTok<\/a> and her own fashion line, but there was a time when she was just another carpool mom in North Dallas, wondering what happened to her dreams. \u201cIt was challenging,\u201d she says. \u201cThe guard at school would tell me I couldn\u2019t idle the car in line while waiting to pick up my kids. What are you talking about? It\u2019s 110 degrees!\u201d<\/p>\n

A Montreal native, Rockmore enjoyed a globe-trotting early career, leaving fashion school in Toronto for a couture house in Amsterdam. After returning to Canada, she toggled between corporate and boutique gigs, but motherhood meant slowing down. In 2012, her family moved to Dallas so her husband, Michael Stitt, could become CEO of the menswear brand Haggar Clothing, but Rockmore struggled to find industry work in Texas.<\/p>\n

Fashion is about transformation, though, and Rockmore underwent a dramatic one. In March 2020, she was in India working to launch her own jewelry line when the pandemic hit, and she had to come home. Frustrated and looking for escape under quarantine, she started making videos in her closet, part practical stylist advice, part creative riff. She was a natural on camera, with her dark spiraling hair and outsize personality, trying on outfits that ranged from classy to wacky. \u201cIt was a convergence of my education and talent, my need to be in front of a stage and a void in the market,\u201d she says. She became a social media phenomenon.<\/p>\n

Architectural Digest has featured<\/a> the closet in her Preston Hollow home, a two-story Narnia of color, spangle and swish so expansive it includes a spiral staircase and fireplace. But the real lure of her videos is a 50-something woman taking delight in the art of dressing up. \u201cOur media don\u2019t show us so many examples of women this age who know who they are and clearly like it,\u201d New York Times Magazine said<\/a> about Rockmore. <\/p>\n

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Now 58, Rockmore has a line of clothes on her website<\/a> as well as through QVC. Many of her videos these days feature Ivy, the 21-year-old daughter whose gender transition became part of the tale, bringing new meaning to Rockmore\u2019s TikTok slogan of self-expression through fashion. (Her 24-year-old son, Eli, helps behind the scenes.) I spoke with Rockmore over the phone, where she was as charming as she is in her videos. <\/p>\n

\"Carla<\/p>\n

“Fashion matters, because it\u2019s a declaration of how you\u2019re feeling without words,” says Carla Rockmore, who has a clothing line on QVC and her own website.<\/p>\n

Stewart Cohen <\/p>\n

This is a first for me. In researching the clothes on your website, I actually bought the wrap shirt dress<\/a> in marigold. I haven\u2019t even started this interview, and I\u2019m already out $55. <\/p>\n

Ooh, you did? I love it! That dress is sort of the ethos of my design, where clothing is your canvas, and jewelry and accessories are your paint. You can dress it up however you want. I think color is one of my fortes, because my mom was a painter. Proportion, color and shape were dinner conversation. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not much of a trend person. I\u2019m more like, \u201cI love it, now I\u2019m going to wear versions of it for the rest of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do you describe Dallas to people who have never been here?<\/p>\n

Dallas is a strange juxtaposition. On the good side, you have some of the nicest people in the world. Being a Northeastern girl, I was completely floored when I moved to a place where people strike up conversations in line at the coffee shop. I kept looking over my shoulder thinking, What\u2019s happening? What\u2019s the ulterior motive? But it never came. They\u2019re just genuinely nice.<\/p>\n

The downside is that every strip mall looks exactly the same. I once got lost driving around a strip mall in Plano because I thought I was in Preston Hollow. Same Chico\u2019s, same Starbucks. And everyone drives everywhere. I once tried to walk a single block, from Elements on Lovers near the Tollway to my chiropractor across the street, and while I was walking along the underpass, a woman pulled over and asked, \u201cAre you OK, dear?\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m just walking,\u201d and she looked at me like I\u2019d completely lost my mind.<\/p>\n

How do you describe Dallas fashion? <\/p>\n

Hidden. There\u2019s incredible fashion here, but it doesn\u2019t announce itself. It\u2019s not going to smack you in the face, and I think that\u2019s because Dallas isn\u2019t a walking city. I\u2019m always floored when I go to Forty Five Ten<\/a> or to the downtown Neiman\u2019s<\/a>. Fashion here is a destination. You have to go to the restaurant, the party, the bar, and when you do \u2014 you will see it.<\/p>\n

And no matter where I am, I could be going to the doctor for a physical, if I\u2019m wearing a great pair of shoes, another woman will inevitably stop me and say, \u201cThose shoes! Where did you get them?\u201d That\u2019s a kind of sisterhood. In New York, nobody ever asks about your shoes.<\/p>\n

You went viral for putting outfits together, something others might find frivolous. Can you make the pitch that fashion matters?<\/p>\n

Fashion matters, because it\u2019s a declaration of how you\u2019re feeling without words. It\u2019s also a barometer of what\u2019s going on in the world. I find fashion history so fascinating, why certain pieces of clothing were adopted at certain times. <\/p>\n

In the 1910s, hobble skirts restricted women\u2019s movement so completely that in cities like New York and Vancouver, they lowered the streetcars to allow women to get in and out. By mid-century, the story had flipped: Cars and fenders echoed the streamlined silhouette of the pencil skirt popularized by Christian Dior. From hoop skirts to hobble hems to pencil skirts, fashion has always shaped how we move, what we build and how the world makes room for us. <\/p>\n

The closet gets used as a metaphor for repression, staying \u201cin the closet,\u201d but your closet has been an engine of self-discovery. Eventually, this became true in your own family, too. Can you talk about how Ivy started joining you in the videos?<\/p>\n

Ivy was there from the beginning, because I was doing 10-minute videos on YouTube for my girlfriends up in Canada. I had 91 followers, and I was happy about that! The only reason I blew up was because Ivy said, let\u2019s take it down to a minute and put this on TikTok. <\/p>\n

Then Ivy came to me crying one day. Actually, we were in the closet. She said, \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m gay. I think I\u2019m trans.\u201d I felt so bad for her, because she said, \u201cI\u2019m so tired of coming out, Mom. I\u2019m so tired of not being who I am.\u201d At that point, I still naively thought it was a choice, and I was so afraid she was choosing a harder path. But I quickly decided, we\u2019re going to support, full-force. About a week later, she and I did our first video together, because I wanted her to feel not only accepted by her family but also pretty, feminine \u2014 all those qualities she\u2019d been craving for the first 17 years of her life. I wanted her to catch up to herself. <\/p>\n

I thought, I don\u2019t know if there are a lot of other parents in this situation, but maybe the benefit of my platform is we can show a \u201cnormal\u201d family \u2014 then again, what\u2019s normal? \u2014 modeling what it\u2019s like to accept your child no matter who they are. Sometimes I feel like that\u2019s the whole reason I went viral. Not for my fashion, not for my self-expression. For hers.<\/p>\n

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