Adrienne Vittadini was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1945. When she was 12, her family fled Budapest during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. She studied at the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA and won a scholarship to apprentice with Louis Feraud in Paris, in 1965. After completing this, she moved to New York. In 1979, she started what would become a multi-million dollar fashion business as a hobby.