FASHION : Doris Conner: An Industry Outsider Keeps the Faith
Doris Conner can’t remember which came first, her faith in God or her fascination with fashion. All she knows is without the former, the latter would be without merit.
“I can’t do what I do where I do it without my belief in the Almighty. My spiritual training as a Jehovah’s Witness has gotten me much further than I ever dreamed of in life,” says Conner, who has made a career out of being an outsider in the California fashion industry.
For the past 16 years, she has designed, produced and sold the Conner Collection, a line of men’s and women’s sportswear, in a dilapidated building in South-Central Los Angeles. It is here, on the corner of 56th Street and Vermont Avenue, just a few blocks from the flash point of the worst civil disturbance in the nation’s history, that the 55-year-old designer spends her day spinning out coordinated fashion separates and Bible verses in equal measure.
“In the Bible it says God is not slow in respecting his promise as some consider slowness,” says Conner.
“That means only our creator can straighten out in his own good time what’s gone wrong in this world,” she adds, slipping the sleeve of an African-print kimono jacket under the bobbing needle. (The jacket will be teamed with a pair of “Hammer”-style pants.)
Until recently, Conner spent five hours a day, seven days a week, dispensing copies of the Watchtower (a publication of the Jehovah’s Witnesses) on street corners. But these days, after a series of personal tragedies, she maintains a slightly less demanding schedule, distributing her pamphlets when she can.
In December, Conner’s 16-year-old grandson, Anthony James Carver, was killed by police as he left the scene of an attempted robbery holding cash and a gun. A few months later, during the riots, many of her neighbors lost their stores and their livelihoods.
For several nights, Conner says she stood on the corner in front of her shop trying to calm a mob.
“I knew I wasn’t the target,” she says. “But the others, well, the rioters were looking at them as part of the Establishment. I just pleaded with them not to set their places on fire. I said, ‘I know you’re going to rob my neighbors, but don’t set their businesses on fire.’ ” Her pleading, she says, saved the furniture store across the street.
Then her father died this summer. “Because I believe in the Resurrection I was able to deal with the loss,” she says.
Since the deaths, Conner spends most of her time behind a cutting table and sewing machine, barricaded behind locked security gates. Friends, members of her extended family and customers who stop by to visit call her “mom.”
“I sometimes scold people. I say ‘no cigarettes allowed’ and other stuff like that,” Conner says. “I don’t know how the name mom really got started. I guess I just sound like somebody’s mother.”
And she is. Conner has a son, Tony, who owns a courier service in New York, and two daughters, Lynne and Tuesday, who often work in the shop alongside their mother. “Lynne, my oldest daughter, produces her own line of Lycra dresses called ‘Skin by Lynne,’ ” she notes proudly, although she seems a little embarrassed by the label. Tuesday makes clothes for children under the tag “By Tuesday.” Conner sells both lines in her store.
“They both started sewing just as soon as they were out of diapers,” she says smiling. Conner says she also started sewing “right out of the womb.” Her father, Robert Tate, was a chef who ran his own restaurant, Bob’s Rose Room, in Phoenix. She remembers the restaurant for two things: as a place where musicians such as Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington would spend their free time when visiting the state and for its 100-pound bags of flour and sugar packaged in cotton sacks. She and an elderly aunt would confiscate the sacks and create school clothes for Conner, her three brothers and one sister.
Not that Conner aspired to be a designer. “As a child I dreamed of being a secretary,” she says, noting that, at the time, office work seemed more “glamorous” than going to work in her father’s restaurant. Nevertheless, she ended up working beside her mother at the restaurant cash register. Eventually, she married and moved to California in 1956.
For several years, she worked at home, raising her children. She and her husband divorced “sometime around the Sylmar earthquake,” and she become a Jehovah’s Witness soon thereafter. In 1974, her dreams of becoming a secretary were fulfilled, but she soon discovered “I wasn’t cut out for that kind of work.”
Later, she went to work sewing doll clothes for a toy company and that was where her fascination with fashion developed. A stint with a uniform manufacturer led to the realization that she wanted to design.
“I worked in quality control and they wouldn’t let me be a designer because they said I didn’t know enough,” she says. “That’s when I decided to work for myself.”
She opened her business in 1976 but she received little notice until six years ago when Conner met John Atchison, a hairdresser who worked on “The Cosby Show.” “He wanted to use my clothes for a hair show and he let me sell some of my things there,” she recalls. “Then I got hooked up with a hair company called Image and they had me doing 17 shows in three days. All the models loved the clothes and they would buy me out to the piece.”
Today, Conner spends most of her time designing and sewing within the cozy confines of her store, which features a half-painted sign above the door and is open to the public by appointment only. Although the place is filled with photos of Paris and Milan runway shows clipped from old Vogue and Glamour magazines, the prices of her clothing don’t reflect an haute couture mentality.
“If I was located on Crenshaw I could get $60 for this,” she says, holding up a velvet-and-Kente cloth hat she whipped up in six minutes for the recent African Marketplace and Cultural Faire. “As it is, I’ll probably get $25.”
Women’s cotton jumpers and matching kimono jackets sell for under $75; men’s custom-made wool trousers retail for less than $75 and rayon shirts with extensive detailing top out at $50. Big wool coats that might sell for thousands of dollars at a major department store are priced under $300. Everything in the store, says Conner, is custom made.
“I don’t sell to any local stores because they don’t really know what to do with me,” Conner says of her designs, which she describes as “romantic but casual” for women and “slightly Bohemian” for men. “But several stores (including the 950-store Merry Go Round chain) have expressed an interest in my work. I just have to find the time to make up some samples for them.”
“She makes great clothes for the runway,” notes Ron Jackson, co-owner of Desi Wear, a boutique in South Central. Although “her look doesn’t really fit into what we’re doing now (hip-hop fashions),” Jackson says he may start carrying her label sometime next year.
Conner isn’t concerned about fitting in. And her customers are content to buy direct from her store.
“Her clothes are different,” says Joel Utterbach, 23, who met Conner through her grandson and is proud to wear garments that aren’t so easy to acquire. “When you see one of Mom’s pieces on the street, you instantly recognize it. Whenever I wear her clothes my friends say they want them but they don’t know where to get them.”
“She makes clothes that the average person would wear,” says 65-year-old Pepper Beard, who wore an oversized wrap coat and matching slacks on one recent visit to the store. “Even someone middle-aged like me can wear them.”
