Marolakos Is Inspired to Do it Her Way
Laura Marolakos worked as a designer for Perry Ellis until he died last year. Now she is in business for herself, after Ellis encouraged her to make the move. She says, “Perry was a man of few words.” But he once advised her: “ ‘Do what you have to do and believe in what you do.’ ”
“I was destroyed when I left the company,” she said of the soul-searching months she spent after working for Ellis. “I lost it. . . . I was never going to design again.”
But one night she needed a dress for a dinner party and decided to make it herself. That got her back on track. “I knew then I should be a designer.”
As much as she admired Ellis (she still keeps the encouraging notes and inscribed books he gave her when she worked for him), Marolakos said his type of sprawling, multidivisional fashion empire is a thing of the past. “Young designers don’t want a thousand people working for them, huge collections and a big money man taking control. I want control,” she said. Now age 28, she has 10 people in her company and only 17 pieces in her fall collection.
She designs clothes for special occasions, and her style is conservative, with touches of Ellis-like wit and whimsy. She uses prim little bows at the fanny of some outfits and high, “proper” necklines on others. But she also shows tight, short, strapless dresses topped with attention-grabber hot pink stoles or opera coats.
“I design an alternative to frou-frou, but I don’t make evening clothes that look like sportswear,” she says. To meet the women who wear her designs, Marolakos is on a two-month tour, taking her collection around the country. “The women I meet in the stores are young, confident, some own their own companies, all of them are strong personalities,” she says.
She doesn’t design with older women in mind, but she will adjust lengths and colors at their request. “Maybe I’m too young now but later I’ll develop into a designer for women who can’t wear tight, sexy dresses,” she said. “My clothes grow with me.” She showed her collection at I. Magnin.
Gibson and Palermo
For another alternative to frou-frou, and perhaps to youth, San Francisco-based designers John Gibson and Phillip Palermo recently showed their fall collection at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.
These are mature clothes with no frills, but they are made of beautiful fabrics and finished with great care. The large part of the collection, daytime suits and dresses in lightweight wools, are conservatively cut. What sets them apart are the colors, which Palermo says he oversees for each collection.
Raspberry-red trousers with a hot-pink T-shirt and a fitted, fuchsia-color jacket composed one of the more interesting unmatched suits for day. A body-contouring dinner dress in spruce green was shown with a teal jacket. And the evening clothes featured heavy satin jackets and seven-eighths-length coats in deep jewel colors to wear with strapless, bouffant-skirt dresses. A sapphire-blue “motorcycle” jacket was the star accessory of the show.
Palermo says his customers worry about skirt lengths, and he and his partner offer choices. Mid-knee length is typical for daytime dresses, two inches shorter is more popular for night, and there are mid-calf-length, trumpet-shape skirts in the Gibson-Palermo fall collection.
“It’s a little upsetting that short is in fashion now just because Europe started to show it,” Palermo says. “We’ve always been showing it. The idea is to have short and longer lengths in your closet.”
Most of the designers’ styles are cut narrow. But Palermo says he and Gibson will introduce short, full skirts for next spring. “That’s too advanced for right now,” he says, speaking for his conservative clientele.
