A new spotlight for performers’ clothier

Browsing his clothing shop is a little like playing a celebrity “Where’s Waldo?” There’s Manuel with Bob Dylan. And over there, Manuel with Johnny Cash and John Lennon and Dwight Yoakam and John Travolta and Keith Richards.

That’s how it goes when you’re couturier to the stars.

He’s an artist with needle, thread and rhinestones who has been making flashy stage wear since 1960. “Manuel: Star-Spangled Couture,” a 66-piece exhibit of his work, just opened at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and continues through May 22.

“Where else can this happen? Only in America,” says 66-year-old Manuel Arturo Jose Cuevas Martinez, who is known simply by one name: Manuel. “I’m proud of it and a little overwhelmed.”

One recent morning in his shop, a converted old house where he and three assistants stitched and cut at tables, he held up pieces of rhinestone-studded pink leather, soon to be a pair of boots for country singer Lorrie Morgan. He doted over a silver fringe jacket with an eagle and rabbit embroidered on the front -- special-ordered by an accountant in San Francisco.

“A lot of people think this is for entertainers only, but the private sector buys 60% of my clothes and the entertainment world -- whether that be rock ‘n’ roll, gospel music, country music -- is the other 40%,” says Manuel, a stocky man of Mexican descent who wears his thick gray hair combed back and a small, bright scarf around his neck.

His work is influenced by the late Southern California cowboy clothier Nudie Cohn, one of his mentors and, for several years, his father-in-law. He worked in Cohn’s shop for 14 years, catering to entertainers.

“I think at Nudie’s he learned the very creative iconography, the use of the very rich colors ... the use of the rhinestones, the whole Western-wear genre with the fringes and cowboy hats and cowboy boots and the piping. It was all perfected at Nudie’s,” said Katie Delmez Welborn, associate curator at the Frist Center.

“Frankly, he is the last of this great tradition of rodeo tailors. No one else is making such high-quality garments in that mode.”

The fifth of 11 children born to grain- and cattle-merchant parents in Mexico, Manuel learned to sew from a brother and to hand-embroider from his mother. By 8, he was creating his own flamboyant clothes, and as a young man, he went to Hollywood.

“This was the place to be,” Manuel says. “Within one year, a year and a half, I was at the top of the game doing the Rat Pack. I mean, come on.” He worked with Hollywood tailor Sy Devore, whose clients included Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and Bob Hope. Then came stints with Rose Bowl costumer and master embroiderer Viola Grae and with Cohn.

When his marriage to Cohn’s daughter, Barbara, dissolved in the 1970s, Manuel opened his own business in North Hollywood. He relocated in 1989 to Nashville, where his clothing continues to attract new generations. Keith Urban is a client, along with Brooks & Dunn and Montgomery Gentry.

“To me, he’s like the Mickey Mantle of clothes,” said Eddie Montgomery, half of the duo Montgomery Gentry and owner of about a half-dozen Manuel jackets, including one with an American flag and the words “Try to burn this one” on the back. “He can show your attitude through the clothes he makes. It’s unbelievable.”

Manuel, who has a degree in psychology, prides himself on that. Dylan’s and Cash’s clothes are dark and mysterious; Marty Stuart’s and Linda Ronstadt’s bold and colorful.

“I must talk to the person. I must really know the face. I must know part of their lives in order to accommodate them in the proper way so what they’re ready to wear looks like the way they act, the way they are,” he says.

The Frist show includes 16 stage garments spanning Manuel’s career and a collection of jackets he made for each of the 50 states. Tennessee’s has an embroidered Elvis, black locomotive and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey; Kansas has sunflowers and a pair of ruby red slippers.

He says he began the project in 1986 as a gift to the United States, where his creations fetch as much as $37,000.