Costa Cuts Cost of His Couture Copies

Victor Costa, the Dallas designer known for haute couture copies that sell for a fraction of the originals, is doing something about the recession.

He has lowered the price of his spring collection “by about 15%, to keep the registers ringing.” And he has expanded his product range to include handbags and bridal gowns, two items that women buy no matter how low the economic barometer falls.

Costa’s collection, recently shown to a full house at I. Magnin, Beverly Hills, includes only a few ball gowns, because traditionally there are fewer galas in spring. The emphasis is on cocktail dresses, daytime dresses and luncheon suits. One of the most outstanding two-piece concepts is a Chanel-inspired white pique strapless dress piped in red and worn under a long, sculptured sleeveless jacket in the same material and piping.

Although the collection includes some “all Victor” garments that he says imitate no one, most of the clothes are done “in the mood of” other famous designers. Costa copies Chanel’s long jackets over short, pleated skirts; Valentino’s “ladylike” black lace dresses; Claude Montana’s A-line “Jackie O” dresses; Geoffrey Beene’s short, swingy tent dresses, and Christian Lacroix’s snappy suits. As for Christian Dior, Costa signed an agreement last summer with the French firm to make dresses in the United States that are, he says, “my interpretations of what I think Christian Dior is and should be.”

Customers for Costa knockoffs, priced from $250 to $1,100, include members of the international social set. Pointing to a black-and-white beaded cocktail dress “in the mood of Valentino,” Costa says Georgette Mosbacher, head of La Prairie cosmetics and the wife of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher, was one of the first to order it.

And although he firmly believes his customers want unusual items, there are some things he would never stoop to copy. At the top of that list is the work of one designer who “throws a map of Italy on the back of a dress and makes buttons the size of frying pans.”