Fashion 88 : Gallay-Gallay: a Double Life in Sunset Plaza

Madeleine Gallay had two black eyes. For weeks they were the talk of her new Sunset Plaza store. People went in looking for clothes but came out talking about eyes. She had cosmetic surgery and hadn’t tried to hide it.

“Some people thought it was punk makeup,” she says about the raccoon rings on her otherwise flawless complexion. That didn’t faze her either. Whether she showed her scarred lids or hid them behind dark glasses seemed to depend entirely on her mood.

The eyes were a temporary distraction. The real news had to do with her store and what’s inside it--and what’s across the street.

She opened Madeleine Gallay in February, and the rumor mill started rolling as soon as the sign went up. Directly-- directly --opposite, there was already a shop called Gallay, owned by her ex-husband, Charles.

It was the last thing anybody expected. After all, the Gallays had always been known as a world-class fashion couple--the Fred and Ginger of the retail business. For 17 years they owned a shop called Charles Gallay, in Beverly Hills.

Chic and Sophisticated

It was the sort of place people bragged about if they shopped there. Otherwise they called it “intimidating.” The designer-label clothes were the most avant-garde of Europe. The styles were chic and sophisticated.

Charles was usually in the shop, or in a tiny, adjoining office. Madeleine was usually somewhere behind the scenes.

After they closed the store in 1985, and their marriage broke apart, Madeleine kept up her business partnership with Charles and moved with him to his new, Sunset Boulevard store. She managed the administrative side of the business just as she had in Beverly Hills.

Nobody who knew them as a team would have guessed she would go off on her own and open her own store.

“Madeleine was an employee, she worked in the office,” Charles still reminds people. “We went on buying trips together, we had a working rapport. But the buying, the look of the store, that was my job.”

He did his job very well. It wasn’t long before designers in New York, Paris and Milan had more than a passing knowledge of his store. Charles could spot the good ones and he stocked their designs before most people even knew their names--Jean Muir, Sonia Rykiel, Karl Lagerfeld for Chloe. Later these designers became fashion legends, and so did he.

Once Charles was established, he persuaded designers to make unique things, especially for him. “Because, to be in his store meant they had arrived,” explained Carol Dean Ross, who worked at Gallay until just recently.

He didn’t earn his reputation easily, and not everybody appreciated his tactics.

“Charles got exclusives by sheer force,” jeweler Robert Lee Morris said. “He created a struggle that didn’t need to be there, asking for things that are impossible.”

Morris is the New York-based jeweler whose handcrafted designs are featured in his own store, Artwear, in SoHo. He did business with Charles Gallay, briefly, six or seven years ago.

Morris remembers Madeleine in a way that says a lot about how most people used to perceive her. “I can’t remember much about her,” he said. “Except that she drove around in a white Volkswagen.”

Looks Different

However, he would probably remember her if he met her today. For one thing, she looks completely different. “I was a heifer,” she said of the fact that she was 20 pounds heavier a year ago.

Another change is her tan; she maintains it. And she’s let her hair grow long and turned it from a sleek shoulder-length bob to a wild tumble of romantic curves.

“She’s not the woman behind the man anymore,” said Angelo diBiase, who works out of the Umberto Salon in Beverly Hills. He styled her neo-Romantic hair. “Madeleine’s finally come into her own.”

Her first solo buying trip was rough, she said. “The designers’ first reaction to me was ‘Where’s Charles?’ I was so nervous that I sat down and had three cappuccinos, which I’m sure didn’t help. But I wound up getting kissed and hugged. It was nice,” she said.

She was sitting on the high-back sofa in her store, sipping cappuccino with lots of chocolate on top while she relived that trip. People like the store; they stop to tell her. Some even like it better than the stores she left behind.

“She’s the one who’s made the difference on Sunset,” said Ross, having checked out Charles Gallay’s new competition across the street. “Madeleine is the one who’s going out on the limb. Charles hasn’t been as daring, or as successful.”

There are differences in the two stores, that much is immediately clear. Hers has walls the color of strawberry cream, clothes made of polka dots and peekaboos, and a parade of little stone pigs marching in from the front door. “I want humor in my store,” she said.

It’s a lighthearted place with painted birds in the dressing rooms and an eccentric English garden just outside. “It’s hard to be intimidated by a pink store,” she said. She paused to giggle and twirl her hair.

“I like a romantic element,” she said. Most of the designers she carries are London-based: John Galliano and Rifat Ozbek are the biggest names.

From her window, she can see Gallay, simply Gallay, a monument to granite, chrome and the color black across the street.

“I have an architectural fixation. Bauhaus,” Charles said. He works from a chrome and Lucite, gray and black office, and he dresses in his usual, minimal style: a black jacket, gray T-shirt and trousers, white socks, black shoes.

The clothes in his store are solid, subdued colors, without so much as the suggestion of a frill or a froufrou. Azzedine Alaia, Romeo Gigli and Norma Kamali are among the very few designers he carries.

‘Across the Street’

She said she didn’t plan to open her store so close to his. “It’s an accident, a coincidence,” she said. “Maybe being across the street from Charles is just another bit of whimsy.”

He could, understandably, be less than amused. Having built a business on his name, it could be difficult to watch someone else use his name too.

Months ago word got out that Charles would sue if Madeleine put a Gallay sign over her door. But he didn’t sue. And to hear him tell it now, especially as her store is doing so well, there’s never been so much as a twinge of rivalry between them. “I have too much money to worry about that,” he insists.

In fact, he said, the location was his idea. “She’s so totally different from me in her fashion perceptions,” he reasons. “She’s more classically froufrou inspired.”

Former employee Ross added to that: “He’s very serious; she’s very playful. Nothing is by accident or from the hip with him. It’s calculated; it’s thought out.”

Part of why Charles Gallay closed the Camden Drive shop was that big-name designers were insisting, in 1985, that retailers give them their own boutiques, not simply include them in a store filled with others.

It was a game of hardball, and he says he decided not to play. On purpose, he adds; he left his old customers behind too. “When I opened on Sunset, the Camden people came in and said: ‘Where are the Lagerfelds, where are the Krizias?’

“I said that’s not what this store is about,” said Charles, who appears traditional but is futuristic minded. “Modern people are young, vital, imaginative people, they travel, they take risks. And they dress differently.”

Once, non-serious-looking clothes were the last thing anyone expected to find under a Gallay sign. “It scared me to be different, to step outside the boundaries,” Madeleine said.

Next for the neighborly Gallays might even be a new store they would open together. DiBiase, who has known both Gallays for some time, explained: “Charles is learning Madeleine’s worth. She brings femininity to a business; he brings structure.”

Yes, but what will they call the store?