Beth Buccini’s early career reads like “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Newly graduated from the University of Virginia, where she studied art history and French literature, the 1993 degree holder landed in midtown Manhattan at Mirabella magazine as an unpaid intern.
Two weeks later, a miracle happened: She was elevated to assistant fashion editor after the magazine fired her predecessor.
The early 1990s were heady times in New York’s fashion industry, whose dark underbelly was laid bare in the 2006 “Prada” film, starring Meryl Streep as a domineering magazine editor and Anne Hathaway as Andy, a recent college graduate and assistant to Streep’s devilish character, Miranda Priestly.
Buccini, left, on her graduation day in 1993 with Katherine Magnuson Knox and Brooks Morrison, still two of her closest friends. (Contributed photo)
“It was a crazy time,” Buccini said on a recent call from her home on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania. She had just returned from a Fashion Week buying trip to Paris for her string of seven high-end fashion boutiques across the country.
“I had dinner with one of my fellow former interns in Paris,” the UVA grad said. “That was Nina Garcia, who’s now the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.”
You may recognize Garcia’s name. She was one of the judges on “Project Runway,” a fashion reality show that aired on Bravo from 2004 to 2017, hosted by former supermodel Heidi Klum. “We were laughing that when we were assistants, we had an intern at Mirabella and that was Samira Nasr, who is now editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar.” Singer Diana Ross’s daughter, Tracee Ellis Ross, was also an intern.
‘Silly Nicknames From UVA’ and Being ‘Nice’
Buccini, who often sports a perky pixie and a ruby lip, said she has always loved fashion and always seems to be on the move, a powerful combination. She opened her two most recent boutiques in the last two years, one in Nashville last November and another in Miami last month.
Buccini has seven boutiques around the country. She opened her latest outpost in October. (Photo courtesy of Kirna Zabête)
Her stores are called Kirna Zabête, a mash-up of college nicknames she and her store founder and fellow UVA graduate, Sarah Hailes, had. Hailes’ fictive name was, inexplicably, Kirna. Buccini was called Zabête, a name her French host family gave her when she studied in Paris as an undergraduate. “It is silly nicknames from UVA,” Buccini said.
The seemingly always upbeat fashionista said her mission for Kirna Zabête has remained the same since she opened her first store in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City 25 years ago and later bought out the business from Hailes: “I want to have the best edit of the most important designers of today and tomorrow.”
Her company culture is “nice,” she said. She and her husband went to see “The Devil Wears Prada” when it came out in theaters, and she said she felt like she’d just seen a documentary.
“Don’t get me wrong. I have amazing fashion friends from across the years and there’s so many incredible people that we work with,” she said. But in the 1990s, there were some not-so-nice people, too, she said. “I just thought, ‘This is so silly. This is a fun job. We are not curing cancer.’”
A Daughter’s Troubling Medical Mystery
As she was building her business, Buccini and her husband, Rob, were also building their family. She had four children in 5½ years. After having her oldest child, Josephine, who is now 21, Buccini didn’t take maternity leave. “I had Josephine on a Sunday. I came home from the hospital on a Tuesday, and I went to a Chloé buying appointment on a Thursday,” she said.
The Buccini’s other children are Shepherd, who is in 10th grade; Balthazar, a high school senior; and Virginia, who is 19.
The Buccini family in Italy in July. They are, from left to right, Rob, Josephine, Virginia, Shepherd, Balthazar and Beth. (Contributed photo)
The birth of “Gigi,” as the family fondly calls Virginia, took the family in an entirely new direction that would call not for a cure for cancer, but a cure for something much more mysterious.
After her birth, her parents and doctors realized Gigi was not meeting typical developmental milestones. She didn’t respond to sounds or make eye contact at one month of age, or smile at four months. The delays continued to pile up. Buccini’s gritty drive kicked in.
“I spent the next nine years doctor-shopping, trying to figure out what the issue was,” Buccini said. Finally, she found Dr. Kevin Strauss at the Clinic for Special Children in Gordonville, Pennsylvania. He painstakingly analyzed the genome of all six Buccinis. “The best way I’ve ever heard it described was reading the Bible six times over and finding the one difference among those six times,” Beth said.
‘What Are You Talking About? I Work in Fashion. I Can’t Do That.’
Six months later, in 2014, she heard from Strauss, who’d been combing medical files around the globe. “He said, ‘We know what she has, and there’s one other case in the world,’” Buccini relayed.
Gigi became the first person in the United States to be diagnosed with the previously unnamed genetic disease, which causes intellectual disabilities. Soon, Strauss’s team would locate 37 other girls with the disorder. Today, 1,200 people, mostly girls, have been diagnosed.
Once the disease was documented, a genetic counselor at the clinic turned to Buccini and said, “Now you need to start a foundation, launch a patient registry and find a cure,” she recalled, stunned at the suggestion. “I said, ‘What are you talking about? I work in fashion. I can’t do that.’”
“Being the sort of go-getter that she is, I immediately knew she was going to be the person who could make that a reality,” Karlla Brigatti, the counselor, said of Buccini.
DDX3X co-founders Liz Berger and Buccini at the group’s 10th annual conference in Delaware in October. Buccini said families affected by the condition came from around the world to learn about the latest scientific breakthroughs and commiserate. “Special-needs parenthood is no joke,” she said. (Contributed photo)
She was right. On the advice of Strauss, Buccini called the disorder by the name of the gene that is affected: DDX3X. “The doctor said, ‘You name it after the gene, because what’s the first thing people are going to do? Google it,’” she recounted.
Buccini and a fellow mom, Liz Berger, co-founded the DDX3X Foundation 10 years ago. Their foundation became one of the first to receive a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, whose scientific mission is to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the 21st century.
“The exposure that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative offered to an incredible group of science advisers and doctors really helped move us forward,” Buccini said. “I could understand how to set up and run a business, but we desperately needed help with the science connections. The grant really provided us an opportunity to be on the right people’s radar very quickly.”
Buccini and Berger have raised millions of dollars to find a cure for DDX3X and just held the foundation’s 10th conference. There was a welcome dinner for all the families at the event in Delaware. “Typically, what we’ll do is pass a microphone around and everybody tells their name and their story of how they got diagnosed and everybody cries, and the doctors and scientists come and they all cry,” Buccini said. “It’s just really powerful. Special-needs parenthood is no joke.”
