Old Guard Designers Merit Kudos
Los Angeles is the place where fashion trends blaze through a summer and burn out by fall, but you can’t say that about the designers. Not all of them anyway.
People like Bill Travilla, who got his start in Hollywood, and Anne Cole, who began in her father’s bathing suit business, may not see themselves as the Old Guard of Los Angeles fashion. But after 30 or more years in the business, they’ve earned the title.
And while newer talents get credit for the city’s young, hip image, the fashion elders must be doing something right. They’ve all got multimillion-dollar success stories to prove it.
The founding mothers and fathers--James Galanos, Michael Novarese, Jill Richards, Helga Oppenheimer among them--have at least one thing in common. They don’t make sportswear. And even their most casual clothes are dressy.
Galanos is so dedicated to the dress-up look he considers everything else “the disarray of today’s dressing.” But he admits he takes a narrow point of view. Since he set up shop here 37 years ago, he has come closer to couture work than any ready-to-wear designer in Los Angeles. He keeps his distance from the others and even previews his collections in New York, which has offended more than one West Coast fashion promoter along the way. To him, it’s strictly business. “Like it or not, New York has the cachet,” he believes.
With handmade clothes and Paris training, Galanos epitomizes what separates his generation from the city’s young trend-setters. “The young are very creative people doing free and easy clothes,” he says. “I don’t do that.”
But even he started out with Hollywood stars in his eyes.
“I thought I’d get into film,” he says. And, in fact, he did work at Columbia studios for a time as an assistant to Jean Louis, the French-born costume designer known for Marlene Dietrich’s couture-quality film wardrobes.
Among older Los Angeles designers, Galanos’ crossover from big-screen to real-world fashion is a tradition. But no one made the switch in a brighter burst of glory than Bill Travilla, who used to dress Marilyn Monroe for her movies. He still re-creates certain dresses for his customers that he first created for her.
Most notable among them is the halter-top style with a short, pleated skirt that Monroe wore while standing over a sidewalk air vent in “The Seven Year Itch.” That dress doesn’t happen to be in Travilla’s fall line. But he did include an evening pantsuit first made for Joanne Woodward to wear in “From the Terrace.”
He and his contemporaries might not be the city’s cutting-edge fashion makers, but they don’t seem worried about it.
“I was never bothered by the rising-star syndrome,” Michael Novarese says about the young Los Angeles designers who get so much public attention. He whisks past beaded ball gowns and dinner dresses in his workroom, dropping names of debutantes and Kitchen Cabinet wives along the way.
“I’ve done hundreds of dresses that have seen the Pope,” he says.
Asked why he doesn’t design sportswear, Novarese explains: “I never understood it. And I always said, ‘You only do what you know well; don’t try to do it all.’ ”
Other members of the Old Guard might say the same. And, as Novarese notes: “We’re still here, and financially it’s been well worth it.”
While he keeps going strong, some of his contemporaries are starting to slow down. Richards and Oppenheimer both made career changes this year.
Richards recently sold the larger share of her company. Then, in a swift turnaround, she announced she would start another business. From now on, the original company will feature daytime dresses and suits, while Richards will concentrate on evening and special-occasion clothes, all under the Jill Richards label.
Oppenheimer designed her company’s new fall collection, but from now on she will only be a consultant for the Helga label. Michael Shore, the company’s new owner, says he will announce a new designer within a few weeks.
In another sort of switch, Anne Cole and Elizabeth Stewart recently expanded their bathing suit businesses to include weekend wear.
Cole, whose father owned Cole of California, remembers the 1930s when she was starting out. “Swimsuits were considered occasions of sin,” she recalls. “Hollywood and sex were what California fashion was good for. At least that’s what outsiders thought.”
She describes her new weekend wear as “button-down sexy.”
Stewart, whose parents owned Catalina swimwear, now heads a company with her own name on the label. Her pastel-colored street wear for fall is washable silk.
Of all the city’s fashion pioneers, Stanley Sherman comes closest to being a true sportswear designer; but he doesn’t call himself that. His category is “dresses, suits and coats,” he says.
The white Ultrasuede skirt and three-quarter-length coat from Sherman’s fall collection is definitely sporty, but not really relaxed. And he considers it to be dressier than what young Los Angeles designers make.
“When we started out our minds were older,” he says of his generation, to explain the look of their clothes.
Sherman’s business operation is still in Los Angeles. But he now commutes from home base in Palm Beach, Fla. “I couldn’t take the crazy pace,” he jokes about life here.
Of all the designers who helped put California fashion on the map, the one for whom time has snuck up is certainly Holly Harp. Twenty years ago, when her business was new, rock stars Grace Slick and Janis Joplin were among her best customers.
Now Harp is about to open a boutique in New York’s Bergdorf Goodman, one of New York’s top fashion establishments. She still makes the same soft, romantic, dressy clothes she always did.
Harp says she never felt like part of the fashion establishment, and living in California helped her avoid what she sees as an unappealing role. “We’re blessedly free of those politics here; we don’t have a party line,” she says. “As a group we’re not as coherent as New York or Paris designers. But that’s good. There’s always a fascination for what comes from California.”
