Geoffrey Beene: Comfort a Key to His Concept

“Ties,” Geoffrey Beene says, “are what give men their power. They are also man’s only creative modus for expressing himself each morning. Yet women have not taken up ties. They’ve taken man’s pants, man’s jackets and man’s shirts, but they have not taken his ties. They know that ties are not comfortable. That’s brilliant!”

This country’s most Coty-Awarded designer (he has eight) loves to tell stories relating to comfort.

“You can’t work if you’re not comfortable,” he asserts. “Yet men insist on wearing uncomfortable clothes.”

Not Beene.

At 57, he doesn’t own a jacket, wears sweaters even to black-tie events and is admittedly compulsive about the value of comfort. He once almost went out of business because he insisted on making easy, unstructured clothes when American retailers expected stiff little dresses with high waistlines. And he swears that Chanel’s fame is due as much to the comfort quotient in her knits as to the cut of her cardigan or the gold in her braid.

Beene is definitely not comfortable making personal appearances. He likens the touch-the-designer game to a zoo.

“People come to see how much I weigh, how nearsighted I am, how short I am. They throw me a peanut and leave.” (For the record, he is probably about 10 pounds overweight, his fashion vision is 20/20 and he’s about 5 feet, 5 inches tall.) Despite some reservations, he did spend Wednesday at the newly expanded Amen Wardy store in Newport Center Fashion Island.

“The most important thing that I tell women is not to believe everything they read about fashion. The influence of Paris, for instance, is now minimal. Yet a lot is written about Paris fashion. A woman should be less concerned about Paris and more concerned about whether the dress she’s about to buy relates to the way she lives. Fashion is treated too much as news rather than what it is, what it does and how it performs.”

Take androgyny, for example. While Beene never subscribed to the idea of women wearing men’s clothes, he says the concept is valid.

“Its functionalism gives it meaning. It is not frivolous, and when a person is working he or she should not be frivolous. You don’t want to be bizarre at work,” he says. “There’s a certain neatness and simplicity to men’s clothing that makes it valid for both sexes.”

Then why isn’t menswear comfortable?

“There’s nothing wrong with the concept of menswear, it’s just that the structure should be unstructured. My concept for menswear is to dress in exactly the same items men now wear, but to take the structure out of them, thereby making them comfortable.”

While Amen Wardy lured Beene to Southern California this trip, it was I. Magnin that started him off on a design career that’s turned out to be one of the most illustrious in the history of American fashion. Beene recalls:

“In my third year as a pre-med student at Tulane University, we got into vivisection, cadavers and all the horrendous stuff; and every disease we studied, I got. Feeling that I lacked the proper dedication and constitution to be a good doctor, I dropped out of Tulane. My parents thought if I enrolled in another school, I might continue in medicine, so they sent me to enroll at the University of Southern California. While I was waiting for school to begin, I happened to pass the windows at I. Magnin one day. I think the clothes were by Hattie Carnegie. I know they were the most beautiful I’d ever seen. I applied for a job in the display department, and I never went on to SC. I learned what fine clothes were all about, and I started to sketch. The president of the store--I think it was Grover Magnin--liked my work and told me the best place to really learn about fashion design was Paris. I worked long enough to pay my fare to France and worked under a tailor of Molyneaux. In those days, the French didn’t want Americans learning their metier so it was almost impossible to work directly under one of the couturiers .”

Returning to New York, the Louisiana-born designer worked for such houses as Harmay and Teal Traina. He opened his own firm in 1963 and has been producing fashion firsts ever since. Beene is the first New York designer to have his own fragrance, Grey Flannel, which is now the fourth best-selling men’s fragrance in the country.

Beene is the first American designer to show men’s and women’s clothes together.

Beene is the first U.S. designer to start a less expensive, secondary line--Beene Bag.

And he was the first American designer to produce and sell his designs in Europe, thereby proving the viability of American design as an international fashion force. There are now 13 Beene boutiques in Japan and 23 Beene licensees worldwide.

In assessing his own contribution to fashion, Beene says he considers his work more conceptual design than fashion design. His overall concept is to help women find their own personal style. That’s what fashion is all about, he says, and achieving it is as close as one can come to fashion divinity.

Beene believes that he was the first to conceptualize the idea that fine clothes could also be comfortable--”that even a wealthy woman could be comfortable in her clothes.”

He considers his clothes precious in a sense of usefulness, not precious in the sense that they must be placed in a corner and admired under glass.

“I have tried to contribute to the comfort of clothes by breaking down the barriers and dictates that weren’t logical to me,” he says.

Beene figured, for example, that wool jersey is just about the most perfect fabric ever created and that it didn’t make sense to limit its use to daytime dresses. Result: the first wool jersey ball gown, accompanied by a brocade bolero--a mix of poor and rich fabrics that has since become the designer’s signature. Beene also decries the fashion mind set that evaluates clothes by skirt lengths.

“Silhouettes or hemlines will never again be meaningful because they were a trick in the first place--arbitrary impositions to make women believe that they had to buy something new. Now, the awareness of clothing is with the people. There are no more tricks. Now, clothes are judged by their intrinsic value and how they perform. The next revolution will come from the chemist’s tube.

“The future of fashion lies in a triumphant chemical industry finally giving us fabrics of such suppleness and beauty that we can forget the early travesties of 20 years ago that gave synthetics such a bad name. I look forward to the day when a designer will be able to go into a laboratory and perhaps, with the help of a chemist, describe his most visionary ideas and emerge with something close to a symbiosis of art and science.”

That symbiosis has been slowed, Beene believes, by the technology of fashion, which he describes as “the least advanced of any field anywhere in the world.”

Beene wants to know why our people in the space program aren’t sharing their findings on astronaut’s gear with designers. Why, he asks, must he still be using bust darts when there’s probably some mad space scientist who already knows how to fuse fabrics to conform to the body?

Until that time, Beene continues his search for the most “alive” silk, the sheerest brocade, the lightest wool, the strongest nylon, the most indestructible suede, the most beautiful anything. And that search takes him all over the world.

In March, it will take him to Munich, West Germany, where he will show his spring collection under the sponsorship of Madame magazine, and then to Vienna, where he has been asked by American Ambassador Helene von Damm to show his spring collection and preview a few new designs for fall. For Beene, the Vienna trip will be the culmination of a love affair with that city that began in December of 1983, when the designer rediscovered the city after a 20-year absence. Here’s Beene on Vienna:

“Vienna seems happy with itself, and you can’t say that about many cities. The women in Vienna seem to be less aggressive than in other capitals. They respect the modern view of woman and yet manage to keep their charm and their femininity. They have helped me to redefine femininity in my clothes.”

Beene says his next design assignment is to help redefine sportswear for the career woman. He’ll also be coming out soon with a new fragrance.

But for now, he says: “There’s too much talk about fashion and too little of it.”