Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin and Michaela Seewald Launch Fashion Studio to Help Designers Keep Ownership

Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin and Michaela Seewald have launched Vanderbilt & Seewald Global Studio, a fashion investment studio, media distribution platform and commerce technology business designed to help designers move from runway attention to revenue. The 23 July announcement says the platform will provide capital, strategic guidance, commerce infrastructure, media amplification and global visibility while helping designers retain creative ownership, consumer relationships and data.

The co-founder credentials are central to the story. Costin is founder and CEO of House of Vanderbilt and co-founder of SohoMuse. Seewald is founder and CEO of V24 Media and a media entrepreneur. Their new studio is pitched at designers with clear creative vision, existing demand, media visibility and enough operational foundation to scale. The platform is open to emerging designers gaining momentum as well as more established names seeking wider reach.

The launch has a specific debut plan: a New York Fashion Week event at Grand Central Station on 15 September 2026. The announcement says the first group of designers will include Dustin Glickman of DSTN, Lorena Saravia and Nabil Hayari of Hayari Paris. It also says Vanderbilt & Seewald will use AI-enabled commerce, click-to-buy runway integration and livestream shopping to turn runway moments into direct consumer transactions.

For SheMeansNews readers, this is a founder-led startup story sitting inside fashion, technology and ownership. Independent designers often face a familiar trade-off: accept visibility without capital, accept capital with loss of control, or build slowly while larger players copy or outspend them. Vanderbilt and Seewald are presenting their studio as an infrastructure layer that combines investment, media, audience access and commerce so designers can scale without giving away the thing that made them distinctive.

The ownership language is important. The release says designers will retain full ownership of their creative vision, consumer relationships and data. In modern fashion, data can be as valuable as press coverage. Knowing who watched, clicked, bought, saved and returned gives a designer leverage that traditional wholesale or agency structures may not provide. If the platform can deliver direct-to-consumer commerce from live events, designers may gain both attention and measurable demand.

There are still questions. Fashion accelerators and commerce platforms often promise access, but the real test is conversion: do designers get sustainable revenue, better margins, new wholesale or direct customers and stronger brand equity? Live shopping and runway click-to-buy tools can be exciting, but they must support the designer's long-term business rather than turning a collection into a one-night spectacle.

The women-founder angle is also not incidental. Costin and Seewald are building a platform that intervenes in a system where creative labour, especially by underrepresented designers, can be celebrated culturally while value is captured elsewhere. Their public argument is that representation and technology should help designers own narrative and sales, not simply increase exposure.

If the studio works, it could point to a more practical future for fashion entrepreneurship. The runway would not only be a branding moment. It would become a commerce channel, a data source, an investor signal and a media engine. That is an ambitious promise, but the launch is timely because designers increasingly need more than aesthetic talent. They need infrastructure that lets creativity survive contact with scale.