Gold Shoulder Gold Shoulder
The year is 1985. Ronald Reagan is in the White House. Motley Crue is taken seriously. And everywhere, as Tom Wolfe would later note in “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” women are wearing blouses, dresses and especially jackets “with shoulders out to here.”
The look--popularized with Norma Kamali’s fall collection that year, featuring thick foam pads in the shoulders--had its moment and then collapsed along with the Dow Jones industrial average. Ten years after, the stock market has rebounded and with it, as a passing glance at these pages will confirm, shoulder pads.
But as Doug Weitman, shoulder-pad manufacturer and 54-year-old native of Los Angeles, points out, they never actually left. “The consumer never lost demand for them--they love the look.”
Weitman’s company, Security Textile, is the largest manufacturer of shoulder pads on the West Coast. And, as he notes, the trend toward a softer silhouette in women’s clothes that ushered in the early ‘90s didn’t mean that shoulder pads were kaput. Rather, the severe, military-style pad that dominated the ‘80s adapted. Now, Weitman says, “the look is much softer. It looks natural.”
Security Textile produces hundreds of styles of shoulder pads for clothiers such as St. John, Chorus Line, Rampage and Platinum in a nondescript factory just southeast of downtown. Inside, the makings of shoulder pads--waist-high mounds of foam and fiberfill--dot the factory floor. The mood among the 30-odd employees on hand, as would befit the making of a product so benign, is light, even jovial. Weightier matters are reviewed in a design room, where fashion company designers come to conjure custom-designed shoulder pads for their creations. After input from both parties, a prototype is made, and the company walks away with its own pad, ready for production. (“They’re very reliable and competitive with price,” says Chorus Line’s Eileen Gallagher.)
Armed with an engineering background and a strong work ethic, Weitman founded Security 25 years ago, manufacturing mostly garment interlinings, the unsung insides of bras and bathing suits that help them maintain their shape. When shoulder pads became de rigueur in the ‘80s, Weitman seized the chance to expand into a lucrative, if equally banal, product line, designing and building all the machinery necessary for manufacture. “I designed a machine that would make a very unique, good pad, and we captured a majority of the market,” he says.
Being the owner of the company and also its chief engineer came in handy in 1992, when Security rubbed shoulders with disaster. “We had a fire and lost virtually all of our equipment. Because we were the builders, it was easy to overhaul it. The business just got stronger.”
Today, Weitman says, Security is experiencing a boomlet in shoulder-pad orders with the return of women’s power suits, especially in “constructed” shoulder pads made from several layers of material to create smooth contours. His son Brian, a recent graduate of USC’s entrepreneurial program, has joined the business, much to the father’s delight. “He’s taking the old technology and adapting it to today’s market,” Weitman says. “It’s working better than ever.”
Anyone who wore bolero jackets in the ‘80s would have to agree.
