Fashion 89 : Raymond Lee: He Puts It All Together
Raymond Lee walks into Cucina, the Melrose Avenue restaurant, and people stop talking. They’re stunned by the visual impact. He is over 6 feet tall, which is not typical for a native of China. Beyond that, his outfit is arresting: velvet-collared sport shirt, waist-trimming jacket, and a scarf tied around his head. It’s part “The Last Emperor” elegance, part New York sophistication, part Los Angeles eccentricity.
It’s also a good example of what makes Lee something of a celebrity, starting in fashion circles and rippling beyond. He has the offbeat sense of style that a lot of people think of when they’re trying to identify “the L.A. look.” In fact, he helped create it.
Complex Job Description
What Lee does for a living is not easy to describe. The official name of his profession is stylist. He gets people dressed. He puts together outfits for models and celebrities to wear on the pages of fashion and scene magazines from Vanity Fair to Vogue. And he dresses models for beauty ads including Clairol, Pantene and Max Factor. Lee selects the clothes, the shoes, belts, hats, and bags and assembles them for the perfect look. But perfect in his eyes is slightly off-center by most peoples’ standards.
Imagine this for an outfit: The model’s evening dress drapes around her like a gown for a ‘30s glamour queen. To this Lee has added elbow-length gloves in leather, not the usual satin fabric, for evening. But the shoes are an even more unlikely choice--heavy, black oxfords with industrial-strength laces. He concocted the quirky ensemble for a fashion layout not long ago.
More often these days, Lee dresses Hollywood stars for portraits, careful to break away from their usual image. Don Johnson, for example, tends to wear Hawaiian shirts or worn-out jeans in pictures, but Lee dressed him like a yachtsman complete with braid-trimmed cap.
Madonna, the sex kitten in the skimpy lingerie, is completely covered in a man’s suit and tie when Lee gets her ready for a photo session. And Molly Ringwald, the cute, cream-puff kid next door, could pass for a torch-song starlet in the black lace bustier he found for her.
He shops, by the way, at a few favorite stores. “I like Neiman Marcus, Torie Steele and Saks when I’m in Los Angeles,” he begins. “In San Francisco, I like Ralph Davies” (the avant-garde boutique). He looks for the labels of Jean Paul Gaultier and Matsuda, and among Los Angeles designers, Pepito Albert, Glenn Williams, Rick Beach and Patti Cappalli.
“I love creating looks,” he says. “Sometimes I work 18 hours a day for weeks at a time and still, the only thing I want to talk about is style and design.”
While the fashion industry knows him best for his styling work, others may recognize him for his first movie role. He played a haughty waiter in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” in which he was not entirely out of character.
In his real life he was once the maitre d’ and creative director for the China Club. It was nine years ago, when he first came to this city. The club turned out to be a hyper-chic dinner spot that ignited the social scene, then folded just two years later.
Lee helped fill the place with gorgeous-looking creatures, many of them models and starlets he later worked with on fashion shoots. They seemed to glisten in the New Wave, Asia-inspired decor, where boldly colored murals covered the walls and monograms that resembled Oriental calligraphy decorated the tablewear. It was the first blast of hip, young, Far Eastern imagery to hit the city’s social scene.
“The China Club was the modern place to go out. I think it really started night life here as we know it,” recalls Matthew Rolston, one of the photographers who often collaborates with Lee now. (Annie Leibowitz, Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton are others.)
After that, Lee got involved with Palette, adding the title of manager to creative director and maitre’ d at the West Hollywood night spot that skyrocketed, then quickly closed down.
“They were 10 deep at the bar and lined up around the block,” recalls Rolston of that two-tiered, post-modern monument to style in its prime. The walls were painted pale salmon pink, the staircases had steel banisters with bowling-ball details. Anthony Machado designed the interior. It was a main feature in Architectural Digest magazine in 1984, not long after it opened.
Lee’s private world is quieter. His Hollywood apartment is a sparse mix of whimsical elements-- a coffee table with bowling-ball legs by Machado, a Tang Dynasty urn, a beach-scene screen painted by local artist Annie Kelly and a bronze sculpture by Eugene Jardin, the South African native who now lives in Santa Fe.
Among his few, Art Deco furnishings, the highlight is a brown couch piped in ivory. Lee’s Italian greyhound, Piccolino, with its dainty features, is another decorative touch.
The strongest suggestion of his cultural roots is the group of family photographs on the fireplace mantel.
“No matter what I do, I always know who I am and where I come from,” he says. “Being Chinese is my strength. My life is not only about glamour, it’s also been a series of ups and downs. I always know that when I’m up, I could be down, and vice versa. I know that’s true for anyone. Life is always teaching us lessons.”
One of Lee’s first lessons came at the tender age of 4, when his family sent him from their home in Canton to live with an aunt and uncle in Hong Kong.
“It was during the Cultural Revolution. My four sisters, brother, mother and father had to stay on the Mainland, but they managed to get me out. I grew up without them, not caring about politics but being the victim of it nevertheless,” recalls Lee, who is now in his 30s.
He tells harrowing stories of life in his native Canton during the upheavals of the mid-’60s and early ‘70s. His family lost their home, his father was sent to detention camp, his 19-year-old brother drowned while swimming toward freedom in Hong Kong.
“We were among thousands who had similar experiences. It was like ‘The Last Emperor,’ only not as pretty.”
Lee and one sister managed to emigrate from Hong Kong to New York in the late ‘60s. His other sisters and his parents didn’t arrive until 1984. The entire family, with the exception of his mother, who died last year, now lives in Los Angeles.
In Manhattan, he worked as a dishwasher, then a waiter. “I was earning $20 a week, working 12 or 16 hours a day,” he recalls. Eighteen months later he stepped into the world of fashion, by way of Charivari, a trend-setting New York boutique.
The China Club brought him to the West. When one of the owners, Sy Chen, asked him to work there, he jumped at the chance. Not long afterward he met Rolston, then a student at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and an aspiring photographer.
“To my mind, in my age group, Raymond had the highest sense of style of anyone in Los Angeles,” Rolston says. “It wasn’t just his clothes, it was his manner.”
All of that was formed in China, where ancient, refined traditions and the fundamental strength of people struggling for freedom during Mao’s Cultural Revolution made strong impressions. Lee still seems to be most impressed by those who live by a Confucian axiom, “Cultivate your person.”
“Styling is most difficult to do for people who don’t have a sense of themselves,” he says. He finds that a fashion “look” won’t fit comfortably on anyone who hasn’t developed his or her own tastes, traditions and values.
He has a brief list of the women who have impressed him, among all those he has worked with. “Madonna knows what she wants. Anjelica Huston is a bold, modern woman. Jodie Foster is very real. Faye Dunaway has a good sense of personal style.”
Movies are his next goal. He wants to design costumes. But in dressing for the real world, he says, “quality and simplicity are always best. The important thing is to feel comfortable in the clothes and in the style of the clothes. There are no rules. The Los Angeles look is a mixture of creativity and comfort. Fashion is about taste, not how much money you spend.”
