Boy Wonder - Profile

South Florida CEO, June, 2002

Though Cortazar just learned how to sew in class this year, he knows best to leave the busy work to his professional team of pattern-makers and seamstresses. Sketching his Flamenco-inspired designs into romantic fashion illustrations, he chooses fabrics from swatches of quality silks, chiffons and satins. With 24-year-old Peruvian muse and design assistant Susana Salazar looking on, Cortazar picks priceless embellishments, like the hula strings of Swarovski crystals swinging from the black satin corset dress he calls "Sparkling Softness." Sticker price: $4,317.

Ask Alfonso how she feels about working for a first-time designer who's young enough to be her son, and she smiles. Both amused and enthused by her tiny employer, she says, "My family always asks me that," she says. "It's great! Esteban's extremely mature and very easy-going, and his personality makes me feel comfortable. I've learned that a designer doesn't have to be smart in business. He has to be more creative, not to have anything stop him. It's funny, but Esteban doesn't seem threatened, at all."

Here's why not. To the manor-born in Bogota, Colombia, Cortazar is the only child of painter Valentino Cortazar and '80s jazz singer Dominique Vaughan. His grandfather is Flares de los Andes flower baron Richard Vaughan, the half-Welsh/half-Colombian cha-cha crooner who left London in the Twenties to start one of the biggest rose-and-carnation family businesses in Colombia.

As a tot, Cortazar caught the show biz bug backstage, where he became enchanted by the costumes his mom wore for concerts and cabarets. At age four, he studied acting, singing and dancing with renowned producer-director Missi Murillo. Over the next six years, he performed in musicals all over the country with her traveling children's theater troupe, Los Ninos de Missi. By the time young Cortazar left Bogota in 1995 to live with his divorce artist father in his Ocean Drive pied-a-terre above The News Cafe, he had all the underpinnings of an enfant terrible.

"At that time, he needed to be with his father," says mother Dominique, 43, dressed in Gandhi whites in the South Beach apartment she now shares with her son. In between record albums, the soft-spoken singer doubles as a massage therapist and Hatha Yoga teacher, not unlike Cortazar's favorite superstar, Madonna, in the movie, "The Next Best Thing." (Christopher Ciccone, Madonna's creative director-brother, optioned the documentary rights to Cortazar's life story in 1998.)

"Esteban's almost 18 now, and he's two years older, and yes, shorter, than his tenth-grade classmates," she explains lovingly. "Though he studied at a British private school in Bogota for one year, when he first came to the States, his English needed work." Because of this English-credit snafu, Cortazar, then 11, was held back in the fourth grade at South Pointe Elementary. But what the kid lacked in grammar, he made up for in drama. Starring in school productions, he crooned Elvis Presley songs and wowed the girls in school.