Barbara de Vries was born in Amsterdam. She has spent most of her career as a designer in the fashion business and in 1991, she created the CK collections at Calvin Klein and subsequently had her own collections in the U.S. and Japan. In 2009, Barbara and her husband, author Alastair Gordon, founded Gordon de Vries Studio, an imprint that publishes illustrated books on design and lifestyle. She is also a passionate anti-plastic-pollution activist. When her twin daughters moved to the Netherlands to study design, Barbara saw her home country through their eyes and realized that the Dutch way of life had never really left her. Lidewij Edelkoort is one of the world's most famous trend forecasters.