FASHION : Local NAACP Honors 8 ‘Great Black Designers’
In Kevan Hall’s downtown Los Angeles loft, overshadowed by garments about to be shipped and fabric about to be cut, is a small sketch bearing the simple inscription: “Willi Smith 1948-1987.”
“I didn’t know Willi very well,” Hall said of the much-lauded black designer, who died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. “But I admired him from the time I was in high school. I admired the fact that he was able to make great-looking, spirited clothes. I admired the fact that at a very early age he commanded the respect of the industry and belonged to the inner circle of designers.”
Only 31 himself, Hall was honored Sunday night by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People as one of the “Great Black Designers” along with seven others, including Paris-based Patrick Kelly and Karl Logan of Los Angeles.
“I like the idea of showcasing black designers; there’s not enough of that,” he said.
As a teen-ager, Hall was already studying fashion design at Cass Technical High School in Detroit (alumni include Diana Ross and Lily Tomlin), preparing to be part of the inner circle. Now he is there.
His Kevan Hall Couture label and the newer Kevan Hall Studio line are carried by I. Magnin-Bullocks Wilshire, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.
He also commands lofty prices. Hall’s couture collection runs from $600 for a short, silk-crepe dinner dress with a touch of lace or a bit of beading up to $2,000 for a lavishly beaded silk-charmeuse dress. The Studio pieces go from $400 for a cocktail dress or a dinner suit to $600 for one of the season’s hottest numbers, Hall’s off-the-shoulder, satin-trimmed pants suit.
Roz Becker, co-owner of Roz & Sherm in Birmingham, Mich., an affluent suburb of Detroit, hangs Hall’s couture label with those of Oscar de La Renta, Byblos and Carolyne Roehm.
Becker originally came across his cocktail dresses--which she describes as beautiful--and his evening gowns--which she terms magnificent--in New York, and bought them for her “very sophisticated, very social” customer without knowing Hall was a Detroit native.
Hall has since made a number of personal appearances at Roz & Sherm, with its trompe l’oeil marble and cloud scene on the ceiling. Hall calculates he draws a few hundred customers to the store who tend to buy “three, six, eight pieces each.”
The lean, bespectacled designer still has the garment that launched his career. It is an off-the-shoulder cocktail dress in “face-powder pink and taupe silk.” It won him the Peacock Award from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles when he graduated in 1977.
He keeps that prize-winner, along with his favorite pieces from every collection, in a special closet at home.
“When I’m 70, someone may want to do a retrospective,” he explained.
Before Hall became committed to his dressy suits and evening wear he took a little detour into high-fashion sportswear.
In 1982, after working for several designers, Hall and his wife, Debbie, who he met at the fashion institute, set up shop in their L. A. apartment. Although conditions were cramped, there were the characteristic Kevan Hall touches of class. His cutting table, for example, was marble.
The fledging collection included skirts and jackets in loden-green wool combined with fuchsia silk charmeuse blouses. Despite substantial prices--$400 for a jacket, $200 for a skirt--Hall says the collection sold immediately.
Looking back, there is the influence of a fashionable Detroit household. His father, who owned a landscaping firm, wore custom-made suits. His mother dressed “in Chanel copies.” For Sunday school, the three Hall children were “always impeccably dressed.” His sister wore hats and gloves. He and his brother (Broadway actor-singer-dancer Vondie Curtis Hall) wore “little suits and cashmere coats.”
Hall’s plans for the future include opening his own retail stores, starting in Los Angeles, then in key cities in this country and in England and Japan.
There might even be “couture baby clothes,” now that Hall is about to become a first-time father.
His NAACP award, a sculpture by Los Angeles artist Greg Abbott, is already over his fireplace at home. But Hall rates the charities that benefited that night the most significant aspect of the evening.
Almost 800 people, at $100 a ticket, attended the event sponsored by the Beverly Hills/Hollywood chapter of the NAACP to help Minority AIDS Project, American Philanthropy Assn. shelters for the homeless and Cal-Pac South scholarships. There were celebrities in the audience and celebrity entertainers in the show, but chapter president Willis Edwards said the biggest names of the night “are the designers.”
Along with Kelly and Logan, other honorees were Keith Holman-Harper, who creates unusual suede, leather and beaded tuxedos; Raymond Price, who specializes in one-of-a-kind furs made in Finland; singer-costume designer Linda Stokes; Perry White who creates sexy, colorful clothes for Non-Stop Design; and Ahneva Ahneva, who introduced her ethnic-inspired garments with African music.
In was an evening with a number of glitches, including an overactive smoke machine, an hour-late start for the fashion show and a disappointing finale, featuring New York super-model Beverly Johnson in an all-white wedding gown.
The gown, by Linda Stokes, had an ordinary train, not the one that was promised--which was to have been made from fabric swatches supplied by all the designers. The plan had been to remove the train after the show and send it to Washington to be sewn into the AIDS quilt.
When asked what happened, Debbie Hall shrugged, saying: “It was never made. I still have a huge bag of scraps that no one ever came to pick up.”
Nearly everything that went wrong was set right by the humor of host Sinbad, who plays Walter Oakes on NBC’s “A Different World.” The fashion show, he explained, “is one hour late. It will be two hours late next year.”
And everyone went home hoping there would be a show next year. Maybe one that wouldn’t be two hours late, with a train that gets to Washington.
