FASHION 88 : Californian to the Max : Soviet Emigrant’s Casual Designs Have Taken Him From Kitchen Table to Big Business
Leon Max is an emigrant from the Soviet Union who found his way to Los Angeles, set up a business and turned it into a multimillion-dollar operation. That may sound like the end of the story, but he says it’s just the beginning.
Hardly 10 years after he introduced his own label to the national fashion scene, he’s already expanded it to include weekend, sports and menswear as well as career-women’s clothes. And he’s come to represent the sort of comfortable yet creative styles thought to be the best of California design.
Instead of comparing himself to anyone else in fashion, he says he is like a versatile chef. “My collections are structured along the same lines as the kitchen,” he explained. “My weekend styles are like sushi, minimal and easy. My sportswear is functional and comfortable, like pizza or pasta. And the Leon Max collection (his highest-priced line at $50 to $250) is an aspiration toward something more sophisticated, like fine restaurant fare.”
But it isn’t restaurants he’s known for. This year he opened his first Max Studio store in Santa Monica and plans to have three others before the end of the year. He launched his first menswear collection and saw it hold its own against the best of the up-and-coming names in New York.
And, not to be dismissed as a workaholic without a personal life, he’s also recently married, become a father and acquired an Italianate villa in Beverly Hills--all by age 34. Not bad for a man who built his empire at a kitchen table.
Max is a long way from that first workplace now, but he remembers a time even more distant, when he was growing up in the Soviet Union.
“It isn’t the most pleasant country to live in,” he said of his homeland. He decided to leave there, alone, at 18, and he set out for Israel, because it was one of the easier countries to emigrate to from the Soviet Union.
“It was the only way to get across the border without crawling,” he said. “But Israel was never really part of my plan.” When his plane touched down briefly in Vienna, he got off, switched directions and headed for New York.
“In Russia I grew up in a fashion vacuum and I was preoccupied with Western style,” the dark-haired man of few words recalled. But from the time he arrived in Manhattan, American fashion captured his imagination. “I was like someone let loose in a candy store. There were things Russia is just now beginning to discover.”
He went to school at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, but only long enough to learn the basics. “I was impatient to get into the industry,” he said.
For five years after that, he bounced from coast to coast, working longest at Tahari, a manufacturer of men’s suits in New York, and at Bis, a women’s sportswear line designed by Jean Ewing in Los Angeles.
Then he met Steve Wies. “We immediately hit it off,” Max said of his current partner. For almost 20 years, Wies had been a clothing manufacturer and a technical adviser.
Wies advanced most of the capital to launch the new business, and from the beginning he oversaw production. Max designed the first collection in Wies’ kitchen and went to stores here and in New York to sell it. Now, he says, the company has reached the $50-million mark.
At a time when many consider the Soviet Union the most interesting country in the world, Max’s cultural roots add to his allure. But he seems most compelling when set against the backdrop of his own business operation--a garment center of Zen-like harmony in downtown Los Angeles.
It’s a gray-and-white structure of concrete and steel, where the noise level seldom seems to rise above a hum. Max’s own office, a bi-level affair with a big window, is completely uninhabited and empty of furniture. He spends his days circulating among his staff--there are 180 people working for him now.
Although his first designs were simple to the point of being stark, lately Max is moving away from his taste for minimalism. He suggests that marriage has influenced the change.
“As a single man, it was easier to keep an organized mind in a minimalist environment,” he said. “But I’m in a more romantic, family mode now.”
He married Kim Adams two years ago. “With the wife came the baby, with the baby came the nanny, with the nanny came the housekeeper. And I find myself liking rococo.”
His menswear is perhaps the strongest sign of the change. For the holiday season he’s designing fitted vests with back braiding and dressy shirts decorated with silk cording. For women, he is venturing into the unfamiliar arena of red, tulle petticoats.
Advocate of ‘Pluralism’
He explains these new departures as if he were outlining a cultural revolution. “Pluralism,” he began. “In clothing design it reflects in a wardrobe where there is something baroque to wear for black tie and something minimal to wear every day. How long can you dress minimally without getting completely bored?”
Max designs everything that carries his name on the label, with the help of five assistants. One, Rod Beattie, worked with Max until he landed a job as designer for La Blanca, a Los Angeles swim and sportswear company.
Having spent time in the studios of several other well-known Los Angeles designers, Beattie can compare them to Max. “The others don’t have a focus, not in terms of design, business or long-term goals. They don’t really know where they’re going. Leon has a vision and he’s sticking to it.”
Anthony Moorcroft, another former assistant, has gone on to operate his own design business. Moorcroft now assesses Max this way: “He offers fashion that is not too forward, but enough to separate his from other people’s. Like any successful designer, he has a signature and he never goes off it. And the last word is his.”
Asked about a generally held opinion that Max is a perfectionist who can be demanding and brutally honest at times, Moorcroft said: “I’d heard he was difficult before I went to work for him. But it’s not a question of being difficult, it’s a question of getting across what it is that you want. I related to his aesthetics.”
A lot of people in his company talk about the Max “aesthetic,” a sort of party-line term seldom heard in most designers’ offices. It comes up as often as talk about the Max company plan, which seems to be built on short- and long-term goals, and appears to be more and more dependant on the in-house operation of everything from educational seminars and recreational programs for employees to ad campaigns and press reports.
There are scheduled weekly staff meetings, and even daily lunches prepared by a chef who cooks them in the company kitchen, all intended to encourage easy access and communication. “I like the Italian way of running a business, where people stop and have lunch together and things are a little less of a grind,” Max said. Asked to compare the company to a typical corporation, Wies said: “We’re a different culture here.”
Longer-range plans for Max and company include a 6,000-square-foot showroom, complete with a fashion runway, now under construction a few doors away from the California Mart, where Max used to rent showroom space.
There will be Max Studio shops in Brentwood, on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles and in Costa Mesa this year. “Five years from now there will be 300 stores,” Max predicted. With his track record, even that extravagant promise could come true--though not easily.
“Starting up a new store is very expensive,” cautioned Sidney Morse, a general partner of the California Mart.
Morse contends that Max’s plan to open one-designer storefronts could be difficult too. One commercially unsuccessful collection can lead to financial disaster. But Wies believes that a one-designer shop can actually head off trouble. “If you’ve got a bad collection, isn’t it easier to find out right away than six months later when you’re going out of business?” he reasoned. “We don’t want anything swept under the carpet here. We invented the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not kid thyself.”
Janet Orsi, who directs her own public relations firm, was press liaison for the company until the partners took that under their roof almost a year ago. She points out that their umbrella approach--housing everything from cooks to ad campaigns, from fashion shows to retail operations under one roof--is modeled after larger New York firms, such as Perry Ellis.
When she worked with them, she said, retailers were impressed by the company. “They deliver on time, their clothes sell well and Leon’s a proven winner,” she explained.
Wies says the company will continue to do business with existing department and specialty-store customers even after the new retail operations are in full swing.
A soft-spoken man who has made a study of New Age philosophy as well as the manufacturing business, his conversation about business is sprinkled with philosophical attitudes to live by, both on and off the job.
Wies believes “there are no accidents,” which explains how he met Max.
And “there’s no such thing as luck.” That hints at how they achieved success.
He describes his partner as brilliant and says both he and Max are equal partners who each own half the company stock.
Max, who hasn’t been back to the Soviet Union since he left, now says that country is in his company’s future.
“Seven or 10 years from now I’ll do business in Russia, when the infrastructure is ready.” That will happen once “smaller” operations such as his--”I’m not a major success compared to the Fortune 500 companies”--exist on a broader scale in Russia.
Although he doesn’t expect to make his move for some time, Max talks about the problems a Western businessman faces there, and it is obvious that he’s done his homework. He can tick off the major concerns: “To find a Russian with $200,000 to invest, to arrange for making shipments, to figure out what to do with rubles. What do you do with them?”
Somehow, you know he’ll find out.
