The Apostles of St. John

Immaculately groomed women wearing perfectly hemmed suits with matching shoes and handbags arrive in shiny luxury cars and limousines to begin their twice-yearly ritual. Nearly 1,500 of them have come to the Donald Bren Center at UC Irvine to pay homage to their clothier--St. John Inc., an international knitwear firm based in a nearby industrial park.

They are the best-dressed guests ever to warm a bleacher seat at the sports arena where St. John holds its runway shows--thousands of miles away from Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue. Top customers have flown in from Arizona, Chicago and New York not just for the preview, but for pampering at company-hosted receptions and dinners that reinforce that they’re part of a special group.

St. John is legendary among customers and stores that trade in $1,000 suits, but not because the collection sets fashion trends or inspires gushing editorials. In boardrooms, ballrooms and beyond, St. John has become a standard bearer among women who want classic style, unwavering high quality and personal service. Its fans include political wives like Hillary Clinton, journalists like Barbara Walters, entertainers like singer Toni Braxton, as well as suburbanites from the San Fernando Valley.

“My kids call me the St. John queen,” joked Tarzana resident Cathy Davis, who for seven years has worn St. John to travel or entertain with her attorney husband. “It looks wonderful on all body types. All the blacks match. All the navies match. It’s basic, classic lines,” Davis said.

The springy knit fabric that founder and chief designer Marie Gray, 62, helped develop is key to the collection’s success. The wool-and-rayon yarn is twisted twice, which coupled with a tight weave, gives the fabric “memory.” The fabric keeps its shape, instead of clinging to the wearer’s every bump and curve. The knits’ ability to be “blocked” with steam and pressure allows a garment to accommodate size variations, a trait that fuels the fans’ loyalty.

“While I was having babies and going up and down in size, I wore St. John,” said insurance agent Judith Brown-Williams of Chatsworth. “And I’m 6 foot 2 and I don’t have to do anything to it to make it fit.” For 12 years, she’s been buying several St. John outfits a month.

Helen Williams, a Woodland Hills headhunter who is more than a foot shorter than the other Ms. Williams said such size differences don’t matter--the sales associates are trained to suggest properly proportioned clothes and the knits are easily altered. “Once you wear it, you are forever spoiled for anything else,” she said.

The almost cult-like devotion to St. John keeps cash registers-the line ranges from $100 for T-shirts to $6,000 for top couture suits--ringing at major stores. Retailers like Hugh Mullins, the vice chairman of Neiman Marcus, can rattle off the many reasons his customers buy more apparel from St. John than they do from Giorgio Armani, Donna Karan, Chanel or Gucci.

“They are acutely aware of quality. They do a tremendous job of making sure there is value in their product. The customer perceives it at a fair price. Their knitwear lasts a long time, travels well and it works over the long haul. As for their fashion point of view, they are not cutting edge, they are not conservative. That appeals to a lot of women.”

Many companies try to re-create the St. John look at a lower price but discover that “it is very hard to do what they do,” said Alan Grossman, a Saks Fifth Avenue vice president. Even St. John couldn’t knock itself off in a lower-priced bridge collection called SJK. It was discontinued in November after only three seasons.

St. John was founded 37 years ago when Marie Gray worked as a model and hostess on the “Queen for a Day” TV show under the stage name Marie St. John. To make extra money, she sold her model friends dresses that she made on a knitting machine. By 1962, she had convinced her husband, then a sportswear company executive, to show them to his store clients. Bullocks Wilshire and a second store bought 84 dresses. Soon after, they were making dresses in a 500-square-foot warehouse in the San Fernando Valley.

Now nearly half of St. John’s $281 million annual sales come from the nation’s toniest retailers--Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, which rank the brand among their top five sellers. Every knitted item in the St. John empire is still made in Orange County.

Yet St. John is an anomaly among fashion companies. The Grays have astutely built the St. John image apart from the New York fashion nexus, steadfastly avoiding staging New York runway shows, traditionally an important source of cachet. They’ve kept management within the family when they appointed their daughter, Kelly, 32, as president three years ago, after a dozen years as the company’s model.

Though the company places prominent ads shot in exotic, expensive locations in major fashion magazines, it depends on customers to spread the gospel. Kelly Gray explained that the top magazine editors already know about St. John. “I asked them, would we get more editorial coverage just because we showed on the New York runway? The answer was no.”

“We’d have to spend more time being something we’re not,” added her mother. “What is the point of that?

“We have 100% of our attention geared to a certain lifestyle and a customer,” she said. “And to diffuse that by creating clothes that are unusual, that people would want to write about. . . .”

“Oh,” breaks in her daughter, “would we get letters.”

St. John customers are vocal. Marie Gray doesn’t have to solicit their opinions when she meets them at stores and charity events. They tell her what colors, jacket shapes--even what buttons--they like.

When Helen Williams recently saw Marie Gray at a reception, she asked why no shoes were made to match a St. John Couture outfit she’d recently purchased. “That night, she [Marie Gray] put in a special order. You can’t go to Donna Karan and do that,” Williams said. She told the story because it illustrated to her why it’s important that the Gray family regain control of St. John, which went public six years ago.

“When you’re public, the bottom line is profit. When you’re private, the bottom line is personal attention,” Williams said.

Even though St. John in the last six years nearly tripled its sales, Wall Street wasn’t satisfied because earnings did not meet analysts’ expectations. The stock suffered. And so did co-founder, board chairman and chief executive officer Robert Gray, 72.

“I’m very proud of our label and our company,” he said. “We’ve been in business a long, long time.” He said that Wall Street’s demands for fast growth and faster profits began to push the company to speed its production. But an oversupply caused massive markdowns and some quality problems. “That was not acceptable to me,” he said. Early this year he found an investment partner willing to provide nearly half a billion dollars to buy back the company and maintain the most important aspect of St. John--control. The controversial move, which some analysts thought was too low, is expected to be completed in May or June.

Marie Gray can implement customer preferences at the string of sunny, immaculate St. John factories clustered between South Coast Plaza and UC Irvine. The company owns almost every aspect of production--the yarn spinning, skein dyeing, pattern production, weaving, pressing, embellishing, fitting, shipping and even button-making.

Even the wool production is controlled. It’s purchased years in advance from a cluster of Australian farms where the weather is dry, the sheep’s diet consistent and, as a result, the wool is cleaner and more likely to yield predictable colors and weights. A full-time chemist also makes sure the dye lots match from batch to batch.

That kind of unwavering attention to detail has come to define the company and its product. At the factory, a jacket is picked off the shipping line because a tiny gap in the sequin pattern has been detected along an underarm seam. Technology also helps. Their knitting machines can be programmed to produce in any given size the correctly proportioned pattern pieces--the left sleeve, the right sleeve, the jacket front in size 4, or size 14.

Unlike most fashion houses, the company uses a variety of fit models to see, on a real person, the fit, proportion and even button placement of a particular style. For its sample garments, Marie Gray will judge a design on four, size-6 fit models of different ages and proportions.

“That allows us to see a jacket on a shorter, a taller, a smaller and a fuller size 6,” she said.

“Just because a computer tells you what to do,” added Kelly Gray, “doesn’t mean it looks right. A computer has no eye.”

The end result? “We can fit most any customer,” said Marie Gray. Some of the credit also goes to the fabric.

“It’s knit. It moves,” said Kelly Gray. “There’s no lining to recut. Or pinstripes to realign. And it has an elastic waist. With a woven (fabric), if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit. You have no hope of closing that sale.”

To keep that fit and finish perfect, the alterations departments at stores like Neiman and Saks often buy their own “linker,” a complicated knitting machine, to finish seam edges that are unraveled for recutting.

The clothing’s style doesn’t have to change much, as long as the quality doesn’t. But in an effort to expand its customer base, St. John has responded to changing buying habits by offering separates.

Even though the stock dropped when Kelly Gray was appointed president, lately her presence has been considered a key reason for the company’s gradual expansion into more youthful, fashion-conscious territory.

Taking the company private won’t vastly change Kelly Gray, who has the most at stake as the company face, the heir apparent and its link to younger customers.

“I don’t think of St. John as something you can own,” she said. “You can take pride in ownership. But when you go out into the factory and see 4,000 employees, it doesn’t seem ownable. It’s an entity you’re part of.”

And one that renews its mystique every Thanksgiving weekend when nearly 900 women camp outside of company headquarters for a chance to buy St. John clothes for less than half price. They could go to any of the nine outlet stores, two of which are in nearby Camarillo Outlet Center and Desert Hills Factory Stores. But like the Grays, they won’t take the easy way out.

Times senior fashion writer Valli Herman-Cohen can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.