Pattern for Success
Baba Bleecher is having a fashion passion moment.
Spinning before her is Ford model Camerone Chambers in a killer gown adorned with black sequins, beads and etched flowers on sheer chiffon.
It took Luanie Kologi--Bleecher’s partner--three days to piece the garment together: an asymmetrical variation of Kologi’s trademark “flame” dress that hugs the bosom but on the rest of the bod moves like a sinful Malibu fire.
Burn, baby, burn.
This truly is a one-piece, one-of-a-kind wonder, a melange of cutouts and angles, peek-a-boo spots exposing itty-bitty slithers of skin, everything hand-stitched from leftover swatches of fabulous fabric.
Here, at Baba--a small West Hollywood salon that is getting noticed by celebrities, Hollywood wives and the couture-deprived--no scrap is scrapped.
Like a vignette, it becomes part of the whole. Part of a gown, a coat, a hat. A statement.
Here, wearable art is created with a needle, not a paintbrush. Old World tapestries and tassels adorn coats. Exquisite French fabric--among the last owned by Balenciaga before his death in 1972--become glorious gowns. Ostrich feathers flutter on necklines. And color--lots of it in raspberry, yellow, tangerine and exclusively hand-painted John John-Sun Silks by John Johnson--could be framed.
Clothes are the art of these two women from very different backgrounds, who came together by chance more than a year ago.
Thanks to a flea market, no less.
Bleecher, at 66, is a big-hearted native New Yorker who likes to hug, chat up customers and speak her mind. She’s entitled, she’ll tell you, dammit.
“Is that a heckuva dress!” Bleecher says excitedly in her street-smart way, as Chambers vogues past her. “I may be a size 22 on the outside, but I’m really a 5 on the inside. And this is one fabulous Oscar night-wearing gown,” she adds, loud enough to be heard in Pomona.
Nothing would please Kologi, 44, more than to have one of their dresses on the red-carpet parade on Oscar night. After all, adds Bleecher: “A killer gown is about making your entrance, your exit and being there.”
For sure, their clothes--the way they craft a garment, balancing proportion with aesthetics to make the imperfect figure look va-va-voom, their fabric-holic addiction for only the best, their attention to tiny details and their love for mixing the old with the new--are eye-catching.
Bleecher’s own trademark creation is a body-hugging gown she jokingly calls the “butt dress.” It is a gravity-defying design--with a slight train--that can do for a woman’s derriere what Jennifer Lopez’s does naturally. In a word, it is, well, Babalicious.
“Most designers design for the 20-something woman,” Bleecher says. “We design for the ageless-something,” which is why the two women--and their work--are fast becoming known among customers of all ages and figures.
The shop on North La Cienega Boulevard near Melrose is an eclectic mix, filled with originals. Prices begin at $300 for dresses, $100 for hats and $18 for earrings.
Antique purses are stripped to their ornate frames and recrafted with colorful beads, elaborate tassels and Chinese fabric. In Bleecher’s “Frankly Fakes,” an exquisite line of 1950s beaded jewelry, the gems are stitched onto fabric and turned into bracelets, necklaces and chokers--and have enough sparkle to rival anything from Harry Winston. Bleecher’s “Cubavera” men’s shirts--Ricky Ricardo cigar-coat hybrids made with 1940s tie fabric she couldn’t resist--have been picked up by hipsters.
On the spot, Kologi will sketch an idea for a dress, a shawl, a blouse that a customer has dreamed about for years. And then she and Bleecher will create the pattern in muslin for the customer’s future use.
Feeding the Hunger
for a Little Glamour
But Bleecher is at her best when she designs for the woman “of a certain age who doesn’t want her arms hanging out” but still wants to look sexy “with a little bit of rah-tah-tah shoulder exposed.”
“Women are dying to be glamorous. They have been in blue jeans and in deconstructed designs for so long that they are hungry to be dressed up again,” says Bleecher, which is why, in part, she and Kologi set up shop.
“We were meant to meet. I believe in destiny,” Bleecher says. Her partnership with Kologi came at a time when Bleecher had figured to spend the rest of her life in retirement.
Instead, with money from a script sold by her husband, Lennie, a screenwriter, Baba--the boutique--was born.
Baba--the woman--had, after all, been making clothes since she was a kid. First for her dolls, then for herself, and eventually for others with her own 86th Street salon in New York in 1954, selling to the likes of Neiman-Marcus and I. Magnin. Her Paris-born mother and mentor, Carol, a small, stylish woman, designed hats.
Back then, Bleecher also designed costumes for eight Broadway shows, including “New Faces of ‘62,” “Second String” and Noel Coward’s “Sweet Potato,” as well as 16 off-Broadway productions.
Her gowns were worn by models in Revlon, Cadillac and Pontiac ads. She did all the ball gowns--Jiffy-popped taffeta creations--for the “Modess Because” sanitary napkin ad campaign in the 1950s and early ‘60s. “There they were, those ball gowns, on the back page of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar,” she recalls, laughing.
She left New York in 1974 “because I got married late in life and had a baby” and moved to Dallas, where she ran a shop and catered to the city’s debutantes and high society. Then the Texas economy went from bustling to bust and Baba, Lennie and son David moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago.
“I was making hats and clothes out of my home” Bleecher says, and not getting anywhere. So she began selling bolts of the stuff she no longer wanted at a flea market.
Kologi, at the time, was in the wholesale business with a friend at the New Mart in downtown Los Angeles, where buyers place orders for retail stores. She sent her husband, Mark, to the same flea market to sell antique fabrics, buttons and trims she didn’t have room for at home.
Mark struck up a conversation with Bleecher.
Says Kologi: “He said to me, ‘You have to meet this wonderful lady who is into fabrics just like you.’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ He finally persuaded me.”
A Shared Passion
Leads to a Business
Their friendship began with a six-hour chatfest about creating clothes as Bleecher showed Kologi stacks and stacks of fabrics--some as much as 100 years old, others that dated to the 1930s and ‘40s, and more from all over the Orient and Europe.
Kologi, who has a degree in fine arts and has designed clothes for the royal family of Saudi Arabia, took Bleecher’s hats into her showroom. They worked the wholesale circuit. At a Vegas show Bleecher said to Kologi, “I want to go back into the biz.” So did Kologi.
Like her friend, Kologi has always been passionate about creating clothes and turned on by fabric, how it moves, how it dictates.
“I was sewing on a machine at age 7. I crocheted and did needlework,” she recalls about growing up in Arcadia, the adopted daughter--at age 3--of Paul and Francis Harper.
A war orphan, she was born in Seoul, South Korea.
“I was a foundling. I had no birth certificate, but it was very clear to others that I was half Korean, half American,” she says.
“In Korea at that time, a lot of the children--those of us who were half and half--were being abandoned, killed or sold into slavery because you could never be a national. I had no birth certificate. I had no history. I was in an orphanage.”
In 1957, she was among the first few children brought into the country through the efforts of the World Vision organization on a freight company airplane dubbed the Flying Tiger.
“My earliest memory is my first meal in America,” she says. “Jell-O and a banana.”
She’s had a great life, she says of her childhood--and today as the mother of three and grandmother of two.
“There are no skeletons in my closet because as an adopted child you get to write it--your past--any way you want.”
Now Kologi and Bleecher are trying to write their future and make their innovative fashion statements known in Southern California.
“This place is just an incredibly too-well-kept secret,” says actress and author Theresa Saldana, a Baba regular who recently went in for a fitting. “I’m a funky dresser, eclectic and offbeat with my style, and everything I’ve bought here are pieces that work with that.”
Talk like that pleases the designing divas. This is, after all, where Bleecher and Kologi want to be, in direct contact with the customer. And with each other, working, fussing, laughing, learning. They are, as Bleecher says addicted to fabric, “which makes us sisters of the cloth.”
