From East L.A. to the Runway
Growing up in a family with nine kids didn’t leave much money for luxuries, so East Los Angeles-born designer Estevan Ramos played with pencils and paper that his mom, Aurora, got for free from a print-shop owner down the street.
These days, pencil and paper are among the tools of Ramos’ trade as a sportswear designer who has taken a business he started with $8,000 in 1995--designing, cutting and sewing garments out of his garage--to sales this year that will top $1.6 million.
Ramos, a 37-year-old Silver Lake bachelor, is hitting his stride at a time when fashion is embracing greater diversity--Jenisa Washington, Eduardo Lucero and Monah Li--in the designer ranks.
With Latino cultural influences everywhere--from music to salsa dancing to Broadway, where the musical about slain Tex-Mex singer Selena seems to be headed--it only makes sense, as in a sense of style, for Latino designers to get discovered by the rest of the world, especially here in Los Angeles. Ramos and fellow L.A. designers David Cardona and Henry Duarte will be honored in the fall by Hispanic Designers Inc., whose board includes Carolina Herrera, Paloma Picasso and Oscar de la Renta.
Long regarded as the most prominent Latino designer, De la Renta will be saluted Saturday by the Council of Latin American Fashion Designers in Miami Beach, which will wind up its second annual showing of top designers from Latin America.
Closer to home, Ramos could be an inspiration to other emerging Latino talent.
“I’m always looking for that up-and-coming designer,” says Lisa Driver, a national buyer for 77 Nordstrom stores, who started buying the Ramos line last June. So far, she is sold on his clothes ranging in price from $78 to $260. Pieces from his spring Mexican Gypsy collection, which includes 1950s Mexican vintage tablecloths fashioned into sarong skirts, floral embroideries on tops, bandanna wrap halters and bleached denim pants, “are selling out” everywhere.
“Shoppers like to feel like they’ve found their own personal designer. And I think Estevan has become that to them,” she says, adding that customers now ask for the Ramos label because of “the fit, the style and the look. He fits denim like a second skin, better than anyone else. That’s what he’s brilliant at doing.”
“I think Estevan is about to break into another level,” says stylist Daniel Caudill, who has known Ramos for 10 years. Caudill recently put Brooke Shields in the designer’s man-tailored white wrap shirt for a photo spread for the Advocate magazine. “You can see it in his business with the way more orders are coming in and the people who are looking at his line right now.”
Caudill admires the designer’s dedication. “That comes from the way he was raised with a strong work ethic and pride in who he is.”
Autumn Rose Collection to Debut Tonight
Drawing heavily on his Mexican-American heritage, Ramos will unveil his most innovative work to date tonight with his fall and winter 2000 collection called La Rosa del Otono or Autumn Rose, a line of sexy sportswear garments and separates, including evening gowns, in an invitation-only $15,000 runway show for industry movers and shakers at downtown’s Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture.
The line includes blazers and sarongs made of lightweight woven Mexican serapes, and vintage hand-crocheted Mexican doilies morph into tieback apron tops. But his prettiest and most daring designs are slit dresses and mini skirts adorned with Our Lady of Guadalupe--some draped with tasseled fishnetting, lowriding pants decorated with the Last Supper motif and dresses embellished with rosary beads. But Ramos doesn’t stop there. Several of his 16 models will mimic the look of the L.A. chola: penciled eyebrows, dark pouty lips and long, moussed locks.
Ramos likes to experiment and shake things up, make people think about the diverse styles and looks found among all the women of Los Angeles, a city he calls his sprawling fashion laboratory.
“He’s like a mad scientist. His head is always spinning with work and ideas,” says his father, Adolfo Ramos, a retired crane operator who works with his son. “Fashion is in his heart, in his blood, ever since he was a small child.”
At the age of 3, the youngest of the Ramos bunch sketched cars, churches, landscapes--everything his deep brown baby eyes could see. When he didn’t have paper, he drew on the walls of the family’s Boyle Heights home where the children shared one bedroom: four sisters in one bed, five brothers in the other.
“We were pretty poor, so there wasn’t much money for toys,” says Ramos, who graduated from Belmont High School in 1979 and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in 1985.
“But I had lots of paper and pencil to play with,” he recalls, reaching for both at his modest Silver Lake studio where workers around him prepare a Nordstrom shipment of 5,500 Mexican Gypsy garments.
In seconds, he sketches skin-revealing saddleback trousers--an idea that got him out of bed at 2 a.m. one day last week. “It’s nice to wake up with ideas,” he says.
“And then here I am at my studio” working while the rest of world sleeps. But Ramos likes it that way, free of distractions as he works at his desk surrounded by family photographs of his mom--who died in 1991 at 62 of ovarian cancer--his dad, his siblings and their kids, who call Ramos their hip Uncle Steve. Ramos is the guy his teenage nephews turn to for advice, the younger kids for fun and his high school nieces for prom dresses.
Others--from stylists to buyers from Barneys New York, Bloomingdale’s and Fred Segal Santa Monica to celebrities, including Angelina Jolie and Julianne Moore--are also waking up to Ramos’ trend-setting work, much of it inspired by his childhood, when pinatas and lowrider cars were a part of life.
As for fashion, Ramos says he’s always been fascinated by it--by fabric and patterns, texture and shape. And as the kid in the Ramos clan, “I saw every fashion trend from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.”
After high school, where he played guard on the Belmont Sentinels football team and took drafting, he studied architecture at USC for two years. But he dropped out “because it was too regimented” and landed an illustrator’s job at the California Mart. With the blessing of his parents, who divorced when Ramos was 6, he attended the Fashion Institute in the evenings while holding down a day job.
Found His Niche With Denim Creations
At his 1985 graduation, he was awarded the Bob Mackie Outstanding Student Design Scholarship, which enabled him to attend the school’s advanced study program for another year.
After working for several years as a design director for various junior and contemporary firms, including L.A. Gear and BUM Equipment, Ramos started his own company and soon found a niche in denim. He hired a sales representative and got his collection into L.A. and New York showrooms. Last year he expanded his line to include evening and contemporary dresses.
Penny Harrison, founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Hispanic Designers group, met Ramos when he was a Fashion Institute student and looks forward to showcasing his designs at the Oct. 12 fund-raiser at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The 15-year-old organization nurtures Latino talent by awarding scholarships to design schools.
“His clothes have a great sense of frivolity. And it’s always about who he is, about his culture. He doesn’t worry about what everybody else is doing,” she says.
Harrison and others who know him well talk about Ramos’ love for his family, his gentlemanly manners, a person who handwrites personal notes to friends and calls them for no reason at all, just to find out if things are going well. “He’s the kind of son every mother would want,” she says.
A devoted son, Ramos lived with his mother, who was the supervisor of the downtown Greyhound Bus Depot gift store until the late 1980s. In 1991 she injured her hip in a fall and was hospitalized. It was then that cancer was detected. She died six weeks later.
His mother loved to sing boleros, or Mexican love songs, as she sat at her Singer sewing machine, recycling hand-me-downs. He remembers her tamales at Christmas. “She was my buddy,” he says.
He recalls a letter she wrote to a friend that was later given to him: “ ‘Here’s my son, who six months ago was telling me about the house he was going to build me. But he’s leaving architecture to become a fashion designer. Now I want him to make me a periwinkle dress.’ ”
Ramos made his mom a periwinkle pantsuit “she wore everywhere.” When she died, he made the blue blazer and skirt she was buried in.
“We all looked in on our mom, but Estevan was always there. I know it was hard on him,” says Virginia Galindo, Ramos’ oldest sibling. The two are known to talk for up to two hours at a time on the phone, several times a week, mostly reminiscing about their childhood. Galindo says she will always be grateful for her brother’s devotion to their mother.
An Inspiration for Other Family Members
“He inspires me,” she says, explaining how her baby brother has encouraged her to reinvent herself at 52 by attending Cerritos College in Norwalk, where she is studying hair and makeup four nights a week, five hours each night. This while working full time as a patient registration clerk at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood.
Maybe, one day, she’ll work on her brother’s models, she says.
“I’ll never forget his first show. It shocked the hell out of me. I cried because I saw how my brother has all this talent. I kept thinking when we were kids how hard up our family was. But all that time that we were young, Estevan just drew and drew. And now it has led to this.”
Ramos credits his family’s support for his success. And even though he has seen other designer friends head off to New York with dreams of making it big, Ramos could never leave L.A. or his family, his friends--his roots that propelled him to become a fashion designer.
Besides, he adds, “fashion is happening here.” Last month, while on a trip to Paris’ Premier Vision, a fabric fair where he scoped out material for his spring 2001 collection, “everyone was interested in L.A. fashion, in Latino looks.”
“This, being a designer,” he says, “is a hobby that I’ve made into a career that has become my life.”
* Michael Quintanilla can be reached by e-mail at michael.quintanilla@latimes.com.
* Fashions were photographed at Casita del Campo restaurant in Silver Lake. Makeup and hair by Beth E. Carter.
