True to His Vision

Most of the fashion world is populated by big, lumbering businesses. They wallpaper their names across the world, defining success as logos plastered on backpacks and bottoms from Hong Kong to Houston. Compared with them, Richard Tyler is an anomaly, a gifted throwback to a nearly extinct tradition of craftsmanship. He is well-known as a designer, but unlike most of the men and women who assume that title, he can actually sew.

Most mornings, he leaves his landmark, Italian-style villa in South Pasadena and guides his black Jaguar along surface streets (“I’m getting too old to fight it out on the freeway,” he says) to his new factory in a neat industrial complex in Monterey Park. There, 150 highly skilled employees construct the Richard Tyler Couture collection. They stitch the edges of buttonholes and lapels--by hand. They trim errant threads--by hand. They cut and hand-roll pocket welts only an eighth of an inch wide and make masterworks of hand beading and embroidery on pieces of precious silk and chiffon. They insert gossamer linen linings in jackets so light you could put one on and feel as if you’re wearing nothing at all.

For most of his 52 years, Tyler has been involved with fashion. As a child, he helped his mother create costumes for the ballet and opera stages of Melbourne, Australia. In a way, he is still working with family, for he describes his staff as his children. Because he feels responsible for them, he doesn’t lay them off when business is slow or replace them by assigning work to outside contractors, as many manufacturers do.

But Tyler looks less like a patriarch than an aging rocker, the sort of craggy tough guy who has bumped along many miles of bad road. Because most of his employees are Asian immigrants, many of whom don’t speak English, he uses pantomime as well as songs of praise to communicate when a jacket should be longer or a waist nipped in.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” he coos over the shoulder of a woman gathering pink chiffon by hand.

While freelance designing in San Francisco before he settled here, Tyler had worked with Chinese tailors. So when he and his wife and business partner, Lisa Trafficante, launched his first collection in 1987, they went to L.A.’s Chinatown in search of a Chinese newspaper. Their help-wanted ad for an experienced tailor, translated from English, drew a number of responses. His current right hand, Anna Yu, was the second person he hired. She and her sister, both trained in Shanghai, now handle the most elaborate beading and embroidery assignments.

“In the beginning, we had a little workshop in Hollywood where we made the clothes,” Tyler recalls. “No one spoke English, but we didn’t need to because the people I’d found were so talented and knew so well the quality of clothing I was making that all we had to do was look each other in the eye and everything was understood.”

When word spread in the Chinese community that Tyler needed sewers and pattern makers, people who were toiling on assembly lines in cardboard box factories for minimum wage brought samples of their handiwork to him. As his business grew, employees would sometimes ask him to sponsor relatives with special expertise who wanted to emigrate.

How ironic that when they started out, everyone in the fashion business told Tyler and Trafficante that they couldn’t run a high-fashion company from L.A.

“The stores, the press. Everyone said we couldn’t get the work force here,” Tyler says. “There was no one else doing the quality that we wanted to do, except James Galanos. Also, at that time, at the end of the ‘80s, quality didn’t have any importance. I remember when we would show our samples in New York, people would say they were too couture, too well-made. It was all about flash and disposability then. Now it’s different. Clothing is expensive, so when women choose to buy something, they want it to last. They’re looking for something that’s not gimmicky. We could probably bring the cost of our clothing down if we eliminated some things, like the little inside pocket we always put in jackets. But people love the detail.”

There is something quaint about Tyler’s fidelity to quality. Maybe he has been stubborn, insisting that jackets be lined in silk charmeuse and snaps be hand sewn, their edges meticulously covered in fabric. In his view, he has no choice. He’d rather sweep floors than make cheap clothes.

“I’d close the business,” he says, “even if I knew I could make money. I’d try something else, like gardening.”

Right now, business is good for his jackets that start at $1,600 and evening dresses that sell for more than $2,000. Yet even before his name was established enough for him to command such prices, and before his couture collection grossed $14 million annually, Tyler made fine clothes the way his mother had taught him. In Australia, he began designing stage outfits for rock bands. He toured with Rod Stewart and became a favorite of Diana Ross and the Electric Light Orchestra. When he came to California, he’d take most any work that was offered, including making costumes for Chippendale dancers. The night in 1987 when he sat next to a young actress named Lisa Trafficante at a dinner party at Helena’s in Silver Lake, he had a return ticket to Australia in his pocket and a $100 bill (the last of his cash) covering the hole in his shoe. She persuaded him to stay.

Three months later, he had created a men’s line that they brought to New York to show buyers and the press. It had a dandyish flair and several Tyler hallmarks that persist in his men’s and women’s collections: fine fabrics, exquisite tailoring and rich colorations.

“I knew right away that Richard was very talented,” Trafficante says. “If you could put his product out there, people would just go crazy for it. It was like a hot movie idea. People were just mesmerized. They’d put on a jacket and see themselves differently.”

Nevertheless, it was initially difficult getting stores to tender more than admiration. In the sticky heat of a New York summer, Tyler found making the rounds discouraging. Just before he made his first sale, he said, “I don’t want to go to one more person who tells me I’m a young designer with a lot of talent. I know I have talent. And I’m not that young.”

Back in Los Angeles, a string of fast-buck specialists were eager to lasso Tyler’s ability. He asked Lisa to sit in on business meetings, and by default she began to function as an indispensable con-man detector.

“It was horrible,” Trafficante says. “Everyone had a scheme for making money off Richard. One guy wanted him to design a line called MTV clothes. Then it turned out he had no rights to the MTV name. Someone else tried to get him to design a Beverly Hills High line to be sold in Japan. It could have been very successful, but Richard couldn’t do it. It was some cheap thing, and he just doesn’t have a churning-out mentality.”

The couple decided that success and sanity would be best achieved if they remained small and independent. The night before opening the Tyler Trafficante boutique on a then-sleepy stretch of Beverly Boulevard near La Brea Avenue, they sat in the garden of their Hollywood Hills home and talked about the future. Tyler’s dreams were to have store windows on New York’s 5th Avenue displaying his designs, to sell at Bergdorf Goodman, to win the Coty award (then fashion’s highest honor) and to show his collection in Paris. In the succeeding 10 years, he has checked off most of that list. The Coty Award was replaced by the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards in 1981. Tyler has received three CFDA awards, distinguishing him as one of only three California designers to be honored by the group (the others were Rudi Gernreich and James Galanos). He has his own boutique at Bergdorf Goodman on 5th Avenue and has been featured in its windows many times. While he hasn’t made it to a Paris runway yet, his collection was shown in London in 1997.

The temptation to sacrifice autonomy for security resurfaces regularly.

“There have been many times over the last 10 years when we’ve thought we’d love to have someone come in with financial support,” Tyler says. “Even now when the business is growing nicely, if we had more money we’d be able to advertise more. Lisa and I have kept our ownership of the company because, at the end of the day, when you control it, then there’s no one who can say, ‘Cut out the handwork and buy machines to do it.’ That’s the most important thing. It takes four people a day and a quarter to make a jacket the way we do it. Most manufacturers will have the same four people make at least 20 jackets a day. That isn’t what I want to do. This is the only way of working that my heart is in.”

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If evidence were needed that a deep-pocket backer doesn’t necessarily provide a designer with an ideal escape from business worries, the abrupt closing of Isaac Mizrahi’s company, financed by Chanel, could be it. Trafficante says, “We used to look at Isaac and think, ‘It’s great he has Chanel behind him. He can afford to do that advertising or that promotion.’ I don’t know what the real workings of that decision were, but it looked like it was their idea to shut things down, and that’s the sort of thing you don’t want to not have a say about.”

When having a say, Tyler’s voice can be high volume, Trafficante’s businesslike and firm.

“People are actually afraid of Richard, more than they are of me,” Trafficante says. “If he does get mad, it’s serious, because he’s very passionate. He won’t let anyone touch his dreams. He has very strong desires, and when he’s thwarted, he can be explosive. I don’t think it’s a terrible thing. Most people come to understand that it’s really a striving for perfection.”

Despite his sometimes passionate outbursts, Tyler has a penchant for being a soft touch, giving rise to a necessary good cop/bad cop dynamic.

“I get cornered, and I’ll say, ‘Fine, fine’ [to a project]. Then I go back and think about it and realize I shouldn’t have said yes. But Lisa’s practical, and she knows that we can’t do everything. When she says no, she’s doing it for the company. She has a lot of stamina, and she can wear people down in negotiations. She’s tough, but she’s definitely not a bitch.”

Being answerable only to himself and his customers has given Tyler valuable flexibility. When the boutique first opened, 95% of its stock was men’s clothes. Today the proportion is almost reversed. Tyler can make more men’s clothes when demand increases or shift the balance from suits to dresses to evening gowns in his women’s line. He responds to the needs of individual customers, a fact that justifies the word “couture” on the label. A typical frequent buyer is a tall size 8 who owns 50 variations of the same double-breasted, peaked-lapel pantsuit. Whenever she wants to order one in a new fabric, she just calls the store, and a suit is made.

One way to support the business while maintaining control is for Tyler to design, but not manufacture, licensed products. Richard Tyler shoes, handbags and scarves are the sort of reward a designer of his stature can reap when his name and image have been successfully established. The sexy tailored shoes, made in Italy, have a distinct Tyler look and go well with his clothes. At $250 to $450 a pair, they are accessible to a wider audience than his signature clothing line. The Richard Tyler Collection, sold at Bergdorf’s and Neiman Marcus, is made in Italy and costs about 30% less than the couture collection produced in Monterey Park. Created a year and a half ago, Tyler thinks the collection is still too expensive.

“The price difference between the collection and couture should be greater,” he says.

Another byproduct of success is being sought after as an artist for hire. That path hasn’t been a smooth one for Tyler. He did 18-month stints as design director of Byblos--whose men’s and women’s collections are made in Italy--from 1996 to spring 1998, and as designer for Anne Klein from 1992 to ’94.

“I regret the Byblos experience,” Tyler says. “The way they did things was firmly entrenched, and I didn’t like the way the operation was structured. I loved the fabric people and the sewers and the sample makers. They were fabulous. But the system was cold. And the travel was terrible. I had to be in Italy twice a month, and I felt I was neglecting my business here.”

Designing a collection for Anne Klein involved less upheaval, but the troubled company wanted to reinvent its image instantly. Tyler feels that if he’d had another year, he could have turned the line around. Frank Mori, president of Anne Klein’s parent company says, “Richard understood Anne Klein and could articulate it better than any designer I’ve ever met. But when Richard got into the design room, to his credit, he found he could only do Richard. Anne Klein began to look like Richard Tyler, which clearly it isn’t. It isn’t that exaggerated or sexy or young and theatrical.”

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Now that the couple’s 5-year-old son, Edward, is in school, they want to travel less. Their 37-room Gramercy Park mansion serves as a home and showroom in New York, but they go there only when business demands. Although Tyler has staged big fashion shows as part of New York’s biannual fashion weeks since 1993, he prefers to invite a small group of fashion editors to his New York home, where a few models stroll through the high-ceilinged rooms.

“Showing the clothes up close changes everything,” he says. “You can’t see the detail on the big runway.” Nor can he explain the intricacies of beaded and feathered fabric that costs him $500 a yard.

That material, which looks like the plumage of an exotic black bird, is stored in a cavernous back room at the factory. Through an open doorway off the back room, an open field functions as a badminton court or soccer field for the children of employees and, in the morning, a place for a tai chi workout.

The Monterey Park facility also has enough space to house the company archives, 10 years of the designs that built Tyler’s reputation. Early Janet Jackson concert clothes hang near the wedding dress that Julia Roberts didn’t wear when she left Kiefer Sutherland at the altar. Long before entertainment industry awards ceremonies became fashion derbies, Tyler was one of the first designers to be discovered and championed by Hollywood stylists. His loyal celebrity following now includes Ashley Judd, Calista Flockhart, Gillian Anderson and Sigourney Weaver.

“What has made Richard so successful is that his clothes are really good for women,” Trafficante says. “He isn’t a designer with his head in the clouds. It isn’t like, ‘This is my image, and you have to live with it.’ He really cares what the customer needs, and he loves to give her that. He doesn’t think of it as art.”

Han Yuan, a native of Shanghai and now a homeowner in Monterey Park, sits nearby drawing flowers by hand on pale satin that will be the bodice of an evening gown after it has been embroidered and beaded. Tyler marvels at her work, because regardless of how practical he and Trafficante want his image to seem, he recognizes, appreciates and lives for fashion at its most artful.