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“Who am I to complain?
Born into this world of an alcoholic father
And a bible-preaching mother
A Southern, half-breed, Black, bisexual
Victimized by dyslexia
Whose father was killed in eyesight at the age of three
Now a transplanted Californian
Born again Christian, Jack Mormon,
Retired ex-Hollywood costume designer
Who wants to write
So what!
And life goes on”
— Bill Whitten, 1983, “To Be Continued” from “Save Me”
This story is part of Image’s November Kinship issue, celebrating L.A.’s generous spirit and the artistic collaborations that happen among family and friends.
Dec. 9, 1984. Thunder and lightning crackled over the strobing sky. Suddenly, a yellow glow emerged over the horizon. Blinding light gave way to five male silhouettes. Boom. Boom. They descended stairs as if from the heavens. Boom. Their heels reached the last step; a chord struck. The dazzle of their outfits eclipsed the afterglow of the light. They slowly reached up their hands to take off their glasses. The central figure revealed his face a breath before the others, his right hand sheathed in a dazzling white glove.
Hysteria. The screams of crying fans overflowed from Dodger Stadium into the hills of Elysian Park. It was Michael Jackson with the Jackson brothers on their Victory tour!
The screams wouldn’t have reached the Hollywood Hills, where Bill Whitten wound down after a typical Sunday cooking Southern-style collard greens and cornbread in his eclectic home filled with African and Black American minstrel art.
It had been a busy year — nay, decade — for the Jacksons’ costume designer, the image architect behind Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and “Bad” eras. Whitten most famously designed MJ’s singular white glove, but had been known — for those who were in the know — as the “Black Bob Mackie” after Neil Diamond discovered Whitten’s West Hollywood shop, Workroom 27, in the early ‘70s.
Diamond. Earth, Wind and Fire. Elton John. The Commodores. Lionel Richie. George Benson. The Jacksons. Edgar Winter. Smokey Robinson. Stevie Wonder. Siegfried and Roy. Whitten did them all.
But despite his impressive client list, Whitten himself is still relatively unknown — a disappointment for those who knew and celebrated him. As appreciation for menswear surges, it’s past due time to examine the life and legacy of the man who transcended the status quo of stage costuming, creating the most enduring images of the 20th century.
“God is in the details” – Bill Whitten
Born in 1944, Whitten came to glitzy Los Angeles from dusty Bessemer, Ala. Going to school in clothes handmade by their seamstress mother, Annie Bell, the seven Cross-Whitten kids (from two marriages) always looked sharp, according to Jack Whitten, the decorated American painter who happened to be Bill’s older brother. The way Jack put it in conversation with critic Robert Storr, all of the siblings were talented, but he and “Billy” had the discipline to carry out their artistry.
After graduating from Dunbar High School, Bill Whitten split town and moved in with another older brother, James, who had already made the move to Los Angeles. Whitten studied design at Los Angeles Trade Tech and started his career in the Garment District working for junior lines and making elaborate menswear shirts that were soon picked up by well-regarded menswear store Eric Ross & Co. in Beverly Hills.
According to archival newspaper clippings, Whitten struck out on his own with Workroom 27 somewhere between 1968 and 1970. Soon, he’d become a favorite among the Hollywood crowd. His swanky West Hollywood atelier had colorful wallpaper and African masks on the walls, a huge potbelly stove and a full bar, where customers could indulge throughout a fitting.
“You couldn’t just go in there and buy a bespoke suit,” says photographer Bruce Talamon, who captured Whitten doing a fitting with Eddie Kendricks for Soul magazine in 1975. “You had to pass the test to get into the door.”
At the time, Whitten’s main competitors were Bob Mackie and James Galanos — both womenswear designers. But in a decade best defined by wide lapels, flared pants, afros and platform shoes, Whitten brought the bugle-beading extravagance of a Cher or Diana Ross to menswear, and specifically to Black acts — the bulk of his clientele.
“The Black acts want to come to Bill because we was bringing the player swag,” says designer and tailor Vaughn Terry Jelks, who got his start at Workroom 27. “I mean, what does Bob Mackie know about ‘Psychedelic Shack’ and ‘Shaft’ and ‘Super Fly’?”
Known for pushing the boundaries of fabrication, Whitten’s telltale as a designer was his distinctive patchwork construction. The fish skin pants he designed for Michael Jackson are not composed of five to six pattern pieces (like many ready-to-wear pants are), but dozens of small pieces of skin sewed together, then backed on cotton. A menswear jacket originally made for Doc Severinsen has dozens of Levi’s jean patterns overlapping and crisscrossing, complete with zippers for embellishment, back pockets for the jacket’s main pockets and an antique U.S. quarter dollar as the fastening button.
“To come up with this type of pattern, it’s like a maniacal, mad scientist,” says the owner of Vintage on Hollywood, Brian Cohen, who now holds the jean jacket in his personal collection.
“He put stuff together that you wouldn’t think goes together,” says Keith Holman, a fashion designer who got his start assisting Whitten. “Wild,” he says, is the best way to describe some of Whitten’s suits.
As a costume designer, Whitten wasn’t just thinking deeply about the aesthetics of his garments, but also how they would mold to a performing body. How do the jacket arms raise when an artist is dancing? Can the garment withstand a grueling and sweaty tour? Are the costumes, meant to enhance the artist’s movements, visible from the cheap seats? Despite, say, the weight of garments covered entirely in crystals, Whitten ensured performers would look sharp on stage. In turn, artists came to Whitten because they knew he would make them look the part of stars.
One day in 1980, after Workroom 27 moved from West Hollywood to Glendale, Whitten came into the back room and found Jelks working on guitar straps for Earth, Wind and Fire’s Johnny Graham.
“What? Nobody ran that past me,” Jelks remembers Whitten saying (in a rather reserved reproach from a man known to fly off when perturbed). “Give me the hours that you’ve worked on, everything you’ve worked on, you understand?”
What Jelks didn’t yet understand was that his work could have been billable hours, and with Whitten — who worked on designs and then sent an invoice to the tearful accountant, rather than designing from a predetermined budget — every little detail added up.
“Let the work speak for itself” – Bill Whitten
For all of Whitten’s work, much of it is lost to time. In the heyday of the ’70s, costumes were just that — costumes.
“People didn’t see costumes as something that you preserved,” says costumer Tony Villanueva, who first worked with Whitten in the mid ’80s. After a tour, if the artist didn’t have a team thinking about a future archive, costumes would be shipped from overseas back to warehouses in the United States. “You weren’t supposed to acknowledge there was a backstage or anything about the background, or anything that wasn’t literally the artist performing.”
In other cases, Black artists didn’t have the luxury of maintaining an archive, says Jelks, as was the case of Earth, Wind and Fire’s Maurice White, who sold much of the group’s costumes when money got tight.
Whitten’s work may also go overlooked because, on top of working primarily in costume design rather than in the more revered world of fashion, Whitten was based in Los Angeles.
“I think that there is this tendency to overlook West Coast designers, and it’s something that I can recognize in my observances just casually, but I also see so many examples of designers in our museum collection that illustrate this theme again and again,” says Christina Frank, a curator at the L.A.-based ASU FIDM Museum, who has spent the last year researching Whitten and his legacy, and is how Image first encountered Whitten’s story.
A new anthology of his music showcases a fearless and electrifying artist who, in his own words, ‘lived out my fantasies of being whatever I wanted to be.’
In 2011, a private donor gifted FIDM a 30-piece wardrobe, all designed by Bill Whitten’s Workroom 27. Richard Wolfe, the donor for whom the custom looks were made, likely crossed paths with Whitten in the late ’70s, when Wolfe worked as vice president of video technology for 20th Century Fox. The collection was then tucked away into FIDM’s archives until Frank’s colleague posted one of the blazers on Instagram, highlighting the garment’s mesh of “Victorian-style piecework and embroidery with precision mitered tailoring.”
The subsequent engagement was “striking,” says Frank, who explains that the large accession of daily menswear fashion helped expand the typical notion of Whitten’s brilliance being limited to costume design. Spurred on, Frank soon posted an Instagram reel elaborating further on Whitten’s career.
“Sometimes, people who work in museums are really in the archive and caring for the objects keeps them going, and while I definitely have that side to me, what I’m really excited about is, how do I get people right now to be interested in these objects?” she says. And true to her intentions, the reel caught the attention of Maiya Sykes, an L.A.-based performer and Whitten’s great-niece, who offered Frank a more personal understanding of the designer.
But disappointingly for Frank, the Instagram reel did not catch the attention of the esteemed fashion institute that was currently working on a show about Black male sartorial self-representation.
“I really was like, ‘Are they gonna contact us?’” Frank says of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, whose spring 2025 exhibit “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is the first dedicated to menswear in over two decades.
Frank’s disappointment was mirrored by Talamon, who took the superhero shot of Earth, Wind and Fire, inducted into the National Portrait Gallery, that was included in the “Superfine” official monograph.
“They call me, they say, ‘Hey, you know, we’d love to use your photograph of Earth, Wind and Fire,’” says Talamon of the Met’s initial approach to license his photo. “Well, great, ‘You know it was a Black guy who designed the costumes,’” he told them.
“Their answer was, ‘Well, we want to show your photograph — it was sort of an illustration to show what was happening — but we’re celebrating this other young Black designer,’” Talamon says. “Well, that young Black designer might not have had a career if it wasn’t for somebody like Bill Whitten.”
The proof of Whitten’s influence is in the exhibit itself: Beyond the photo showcasing Whitten’s custom designs for all nine members of Earth, Wind and Fire, there is also a Prince shirt designed by Jelks and Louis Wells, who were Whitten’s proteges, in the section on Black male beauty. (The Met did not respond to a request for comment.)
While people like Frank grapple with how to recenter Whitten’s contributions now, Whitten knew his impact while he was alive. He referred to himself as an “image maker,” as his brother Jack revealed in an essay in photographer Bruce Weber’s 2016 book “Wild Blue Yonder.”
When Whitten started working with a new client, he first listened to their music. He believed that music came from the heavens, and that an artist was uniquely blessed with musical talents, says Villanueva. From the music, Whitten would catch inspiration and design something that captured the unique essence of the artist.
“The one thing that Bill was great at was building an image that was endemic to the person,” says Sykes. “People associate costumes that my uncle made with that person’s image, because he was very good at that. He was looking for individuality.”
And the 2011 FIDM accession proves that Whitten’s ability to create “the best version of yourself” wasn’t limited to stage costume, says Frank.
But the overwhelming feeling among the generation that worked with Whitten is that by the turn of the millennium the fashion world no longer valued the high standards of custom design. Spurred on by the street styles of hip-hop, the ‘90s kicked off the “age of the stylist,” says wardrobe manager Thomas D. Wells, brother to Louis. Artists were tapping stylists to buy clothes for them, rather than working with a designer to create an entire look from scratch, and hence faded costume designers out.
Pasquale Fabrizio, a custom shoemaker, whose uncle and namesake first worked with Whitten, has seen this firsthand. Back in the day, he would take molds of an artist’s foot, completing the shoemaking process in-house to ensure durability and comfort for the performer.
The L.A.-born costume designer of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and owner of Virgil Normal has never stopped venturing around.
Today, with younger artists and celebrities “it has nothing to do with quality, it’s all brand-driven,” Fabrizio says. “That’s how they identify fashion with luxury. So if you’re doing something custom, it doesn’t matter what you build. If there’s no title, no name on it, nobody touches them.”
This kind of thinking, of course, ignores that many people, representing many specialties, must come together to make a standout garment. In Whitten’s case, he conducted an orchestra of the best artisans in Los Angeles to pull off his intricate designs, including but not limited to Stella Ruata and Bessie Nelson at Artistic Hand Beading; Warren R. Caton of A1 Pleating and Belting; Fabrizio of Pasquale Shoe Restoration; Andre No. 1 Custom Shoes; Mariam Barbar and sons of Bon Choix Couture; welders Maggie Schpak and Tom Browne from the old Western Costume Co.; and the more than 30 in-house pattern-makers, cutters, seamstresses and tailors employed during Workroom 27’s heyday in the ’70s.
“This can’t be done,” Caton was known to say to Whitten when he’d bring in this or another item for embellishment.
“That’s why I’m bringing it to you,” Whitten would reply.
“No one could hide their true self from Bill F. Whitten” – Jack Whitten
As with many of his professional relationships, Whitten’s long-running partnership with Earth, Wind and Fire disintegrated, in 1980 (this time, over money). Jelks and Wells gradually took over shop, and when Earth, Wind and Fire took a hiatus in 1984, they began designing for a Minnesotan upstart named Prince. Over that same time period, Whitten disappeared.
A February 1980 article from the Daily Record, originally sourced by Frank, recounts Whitten’s recent admittance to the Mormon priesthood. “It means my company will change directions. I will never work on another Sunday and I will have to give up certain evenings for family night meetings,” Whitten was quoted saying at the time.
By “my company will change directions,” Whitten is referring to his sexuality, a personal struggle he details explicitly in a poetry collection called “Save Me,” self-published in 1983 while still on a break from costuming. Frank calls it the most surprising find of her research — incidentally via Worldcat after months of searching the public library archives. The book dwells on “the ‘uglier’ side of the Gay experience — drug abuse and self-destruction, promiscuity and alienation, and the lack of direction of many gays,” as stated in the introduction by Jerry De Gracia.
“My uncle struggled with, I think, feeling what he thought was normality as a gay person,” says Sykes. “I think at one point he thought, maybe if I become Mormon, then it will convert me. He was considering getting married to a woman, and then I think he was just kind of like, ‘I dig the religion, but that part’s not for me.’”
Deliberations of self were always part of Whitten’s journey. Growing up as the youngest of seven siblings in Bessemer, his older brothers would teasingly bully him, the smallest physically with the worst temper. They called Whitten a “wasp” for the way he’d sting back by tossing his shoes at them.
Whitten was also the fairest of his siblings. After his seamstress mom relaxed his hair, and while wearing a hat, he could pass for white; he’d be sent into town to shop. These negotiations of race and class were later reflected in the signage for Whitten’s Workroom 27: a sharply dressed man in the style of a blackface caricature beneath the words “Spoony Bill’s.”
As a young man in the ’70s, Whitten wasn’t defined by his sexuality — by several accounts he was far from flamboyant. He always dressed sharp and exuded power where his white romantic partner Steve Loomis exuded Haight-Ashbury hippiness. In a cheeky move, Whitten disseminated pins that said “Black is a queer color” to his gay friends, including Little Richard, and they would flash the pins from their inner lapels when they saw each other.
Anything that has some sort of repetition puts you in a meditative, trance-like state. Getting ready intentionally allows you to zone out and be with your thoughts.
Yet Whitten clearly struggled with his sense of self — despite the fact that his sexuality, an open fact, didn’t detrimentally impact his career crafting images for others.
“Most homosexuals would not like / For me to admit that it is a social problem,” Whitten writes in the poem “Coming Out In Protest.” “But in this lifetime / In this country / As long as the social attitudes / And legal negativities exist / Homosexuals have a serious problem of oppression / That to a group of sensitive people / It affects their inner soul / Producing mass strangeness.”
Whitten was still wrestling with this “mass strangeness” when he returned to society one year later, in 1984. He was there at Kenny Rogers’ extravagant 40th birthday party for his wife, Marianne. He was there the night Michael Jackson, whom he dressed, won eight Grammys. He costumed all the Jackson brothers for the record-breaking Victory tour. But struggles with substance abuse would color the next decade of the 40-year-old’s life.
Having closed Workroom 27, Whitten began primarily working with the Berberian family of Bon Choix Couture, then located in a 1,000-square-foot shop on S. Robertson Boulevard. Most days he could be found there at lunchtime, eating the homemade Armenian food of matriarch Mariam Barbar, who founded the shop in Los Angeles after the family fled the Lebanese civil war.
Whitten’s relationship with the Berberian family cemented when he and Bon Choix became partners in his new Bill Whitten store on Melrose (before all the major brands moved there). Located doors down from Fred Segal, the store sold fashion, rather than costumes, though of course still at inventive levels and for those who could afford it.
Talking about the Grammys disturbs Bill Whitten.
Everyone who was anyone was at the store’s opening on March 4, 1990. Cicely Tyson, one of Whitten’s best friends, shaved her head and emceed the opening fashion show, held beneath a tent in the back parking lot. Lola Falana was there with Emmanuel Lewis on her lap. Lionel Richie’s daughter modeled, and her mother, Brenda, closed the show in a wedding dress look. Whitten stood on stage in a top hat and his hair in a zany afro — which was actually a weave installed by four Senegalese women for the price of $2,600, says Sykes.
Bill Whitten, the store, didn’t sell single- or double-breasted jackets — too basic. Instead, it stocked up to 65 jacket designs, with asymmetrical necklines, embroidered lapels, zippers running vertically from hip to nip, accented with strips of leather, you name it.
The shop operated as what today’s designers may call “demi-couture.” Because the garments were so difficult to make, only one size would be on the shelves. When a customer would order one, the pattern would be waiting in the back workroom to be made fit to tailor. A more popular item, like a buckled jacket styled from Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation costume, Agop “Jack” Berberian can remember making 150 times.
But as the months went by, Whitten’s presence at the store became more and more sparse. The signs of drug abuse had started to show in the late ’80s. His relationship with Michael Jackson fractured after Whitten, unauthorized, haphazardly operated stage machinery, injuring Japanese workers in the process, during the initial Japan leg of the 1987-1988 Bad tour. Back in L.A., he began carrying a cane to keep himself up, says Berberian. His accounting, once meticulous, became sloppy; he was often not present when it was time to sign checks. One time, Rep. Maxine Waters visited the shop, Berberian remembers, and Whitten fell out.
But it would be dishonest to attribute Whitten’s decline solely to drug abuse. A decade later, in 1998, Whitten and Sykes — who at the time was interning for him — were in his home workroom when the phone rang. Sykes picked up. It was the pharmacist, who started rattling off Whitten’s medications. Sykes froze before whispering, “Hold on, I’m gonna get Bill for you.” Whitten took over the conversation, as normal, yet confronted his niece when he hung up the phone. “What did you hear?” he asked. He knew, her stone-faced look told him as such, that she knew. He was HIV positive.
“You can’t tell anybody,” said the private man, with big emotions, who designed drag costumes for disco legends like Sylvester, who made shirts referencing DARE to resist drugs even as he battled addiction, yet carried so much shame. By Sykes’ estimates, Whitten contracted HIV in the late 1980s. He had been secretly living with the disease when he died of brain cancer and complications from AIDS in 2006. He was 62.
Jacket, circa 1973. Bill Whitten. Workroom 27. Gift of Richard Wolfe. ASU FIDM Museum Collection.
“Express what you feel” – Bill Whitten
Whitten did eventually wean off drugs, with his older brother James straightening him out, says Sykes. In his last years of life, Whitten spent time with his older sister Martha in Chicago, before moving back to Los Angeles in 2004. After selling his Hollywood Hills home and liquidating his assets, he moved in with James, the one he first followed to L.A., and became a bona fide family man. Days were spent watching boxing matches with James, whom he called “Brother,” and attending cousins’ babies’ birthday parties. He even had “his chair” in James’ house, as Black elders do.
But even as Whitten’s health declined, he remained frenetically creative and was never limited to one mode of expression, says Whitten’s nephew Jimmy Cross. Whitten was working with Cirque du Soleil. He designed light-up costumes for Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede. He was creating a plus-size brand for juniors. He had ambitions to turn a short story of his called “Cotton” into an animated short.
“He had open contracts when he died,” says Cross’ wife, Margo, who, along with Sykes, has taken the family lead on amplifying Whitten’s story.
The women are matched in urgency by Frank, who for now is continuing to assemble information about the designer, including conducting oral histories, and would love to stage an exhibit on Whitten when the resources and time come.
What would Whitten think of these efforts?
It’s a question designers who have worked with Whitten, sitting in front of their own sketches, have asked themselves.
As a designer, Whitten was incapable of being boring and unduly compelled toward originality. Spending time with his clothes — pinstriped suits accented with sinewy leather, belts embellished with coins and cowrie shells, or delicate yet stiff snakeskin pants — one is struck by the immeasurable depths of his inspiration.
“Don’t worry about what other people are thinking when you’re trying to express your art,” Whitten once said to Wells, when collaborating on the wardrobe for Neil Diamond, the designer’s longest-held client.
“Express your art. Know your history. Just use your God-given talent to express yourself,” he’d say.
Whitten had a remarkable and fraught life, and he made the iconic image of so many artists. But it is this soul-catching ability, as his brother Jack once reflected, that makes Bill Whitten one of one.
