What Goes Around : From Movie Studios to Private Labels, Irene Salinger Has Seen It All Before

Irene Salinger has been there. She sewed a leather hip-hugger belt onto leopard-skin pants and hand pasted sequins on a bustier. . . decades ago.

Salinger, now in her 80s, has had a long career as a fashion designer that spanned from the late 1930s when she was a wardrobe designer at Republic Pictures until 1978 when she retired from Lanz of California.

Many of her clothes from the 1950s are back in style: slim sheaths, skirts with side slits and classic black-and-white suits.

“When I look at all my clothes and think about all the different eras I designed in, I feel as if my life is rolling by before my eyes--not the people I came in contact with, but the fashion,” says the designer who worked under the name of Irene Saltern.

The four schools that are popular now--classic, minimal, retro and romantic--have always been her design choices. “My black-and-white ensembles are classic; the simple black velvet dresses are minimal; the prints are retro, and the silk organzas are romantic,” she says. “I always designed clothes to flatter the body, not to distort it.”

Although she originally planned to be an architect like her father, Salinger took fashion classes in her native Berlin and found her true calling.

In 1937, when she was in her early 20s, she and her husband, Harry, moved to California, where she was introduced by mutual friends to Max Factor. “Knowing Max Factor gave me an entry into the movie studios when I arrived,” she says. “I was too naive and young to know how hard it could have been” to get inside a studio.

After working for Republic Pictures in the wardrobe department, she made a big leap by landing a position in charge of actresses’ wardrobes with Samuel Goldwyn Pictures in the 1940s. “If [Gilbert] Adrian was the king of designers, I was one of the princesses,” she says, referring to her counterpart at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the movies’ Golden Years.

Among the 140 stars Salinger designed for were Martha Scott, Margaret Sullavan, Ann Miller and, on one occasion, Cary Grant.

“I loved every minute of it, but it was very hard to care for a family when you’re staying up until midnight every night working with actresses” for fittings, says Salinger, who has one son, a lawyer in Newport Beach.

Salinger left studio work to design for Los Angeles-based Tabac, a sportswear line, in 1949. “I had to learn all about designing for the four seasons, since there were none in the movies. Mr. Tabac wanted different lines for each season and a cruise line besides. Coming from Berlin, I didn’t even know what a cruise was.”

Among the innovations that Salinger says she started were coordinates. “Mr. Tabac hired me to do sportswear, but I ended up designing everything. At that time in the late 1940s, the idea of sweaters, skirts, blouses and pants coordinating in style and color was unheard of. After the other designers saw how successful it was, they all began to do the same thing,” she says.

Tabac clothes were a step under couture and were made extremely well. “I always had long zippers in the clothes so that nothing had to be put on over the head. Today they use short little zippers to cut costs,” she says. “I also always had at least an inch seam so that clothes could be let out if you gained weight.”

Salinger used fabric as her inspiration. In 1950, she designed a black-and-white outfit with a black velvet skirt, knit sweater and white linen jacket with a black velvet collar and pocket details that looks right in style today.

“I was known for my black-and-white ensembles. Every year I was told to do the same thing, only different,” says Salinger, who left Tabac in the 1960s to work for the Phil Rose label and then Lanz, a women’s sportswear company, from which she retired to care for her husband, who died in 1982.

Some of her other innovations during the ‘50s were combining strips of light blue linen and satin for a summer dress; making leopard-skin fake-fur pants with a sewn-in leather hip-hugger belt, and hand-pasting sequins on a floor-length peach-colored silk organza skirt and bustier.

“One of the things I did in the 1950s was to design pantsuits for career girls,” Salinger says. “That was really ahead of the times, since most women didn’t work out of the home, and career clothes were almost unheard of.”

Many of Salinger’s clothes and sketches have been donated to museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is running an exhibit on MGM counterpart Adrian (“Adrian: The Couture Years, 1942-52) through Jan. 7.

She and her friends continue to wear some of the clothes she designed.

“I recently received a picture of one of my friend’s granddaughters wearing a formal dress I designed in the 1950s,” she says. “She looked lovely in it, and it made me so happy to see it.”