Designer History

Madame Alix Gres (1903-1993) was actually born Germaine Emilie Krebs in Paris. She began as a sculptor, but never had a fruitful career. Frustrated, she began to design toiles for a design house in Paris. That’s when she decided to try her hand at fashion design.

She opened her first house under the name Alix Barton. She designed silk jersey dresses with simple lines and draping, and began gaining some publicity in fashion magazines. Her house was simply named “Alix”.

She felt that the true job of the couturier was not create a name for him/herself, as many designers do, but to pay rigorous attention to the clothing.

Her training as a sculptor influenced her clothing designs. She once created a dress modeled after the Louvre’s Nike of Samothrace. Alix created many of her gowns from silk jersey which she draped and pleated and cut on the bias.

Carmen de Tomasso (1909 – 2015)

“I don’t like sophistication”

The words of Carmen de Tomasso, looking back on her career, in 1989, sound somewhat absurd coming from a Paris couturière who resided in a veritable treasure trove of Louis XVI furniture and rich tapestries. But in 1950, ‘Carven’, as she renamed herself, was something different.

In 1947, Dior had reasserted the luxury of Paris design with the lavish New Look. Carven, who established her maison at the Rond Pont des Champs-Elysses in 1945 (having possibly first attempted to start her business in 1938), followed an altogether different, more modern tack.

Geoffrey Beene (1927 – 2004)

The Vintage Fashion Guild would like to honor the life and work of designer Geoffrey Beene who passed away in September, 2004. We have collected a pictorial history of his designs through the years of actual garments either owned or sold by our members.

Beene was born August 30th, 1927 in Haynesville, Louisiana. Initially, Beene planned to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become a doctor. He was enrolled in the pre-med program at Tulane University, New Orleans. It was here where Beene began sketching his first designs.

He quit medical school and his displeased parents sent him to the University of Southern California to complete his studies. Instead, he landed his first job in the industry as an assistant in the display department of the downtown Los Angeles branch of I. Magnin.

Hattie Carnegie (1889 -1956) was born in Vienna, Austria. Her name was Henrietta Kanengeiser. In 1900, she immigrated to the United States, and settled with her family in New York City. There is a famous story that while on the ship to America, Hattie asked a fellow voyager about who the richest and most prosperous people in America were. The answer was, “Andrew Carnegie” and according to the story, young Hattie decided to change her name to Carnegie. Eventually the rest of her family dropped Kanengeiser and adopted the Carnegie name, a practice that was common among immigrants.

By the time she was a young teenager, Hattie was already working. She worked at various millinery establishments, and at Macy’s. But in 1909 she, along with friend Rose Roth, opened her own business, a tiny hat shop. It was called “Carnegie – Ladies’ Hatter.” They also sold dresses, which were made by Rose, as Hattie could not sew. Hattie did the hats. The place was a huge success, partly due to Hattie’s sense of style and appearance, and four years later they moved to a larger place and were able to incorporate as a business.

As the business grew, Hattie and Rose were able to hire workers who made the designs that Hattie developed. At this time, ALL fashion came from Paris, and so Hattie studied the Parisian styles, choosing only the best, and adapting them for her customers. And while she could neither sketch nor sew, Hattie was very good at communicating to her workers exactly what she wanted them to do.

In 1919, Hattie bought Rose Roth’s share of the business, and Hattie Carnegie, Inc. was born. This was also the year of her first buying trip to Paris. As I said before, during this time it was generally believed that all good fashion originated in Paris. It was common practice for American specialty shops like Carnegie’s and Bergdorf Goodman to go to the Paris shows. They would buy dresses and bring them back to America where they would be adapted and/or copied for the American market. The best description of this practice is in Elizabeth Hawes’s book, Fashion is Spinach, another vintage book that I highly recommend to students of fashion history.

The following was adapted from a 2006 live workshop presented by Chris Riopelle.

Part I: The Beginning

Joe Famolare grew up in a third generation shoe making family. He was born in Boston and grew up in Chestnut Hill, which is a neighborhood/area on Boston’s south side. His father, Joe Sr., owned Famolare Shoe Engineering, which was opened in 1934. The company made cutting patterns for the shoe industry. Joe Jr. started working at the family business at the tender age of 12. Very cognizant of the child labor laws, Joe Sr. required him to pay income tax and file at that age. When Joe Jr. became the age of majority, he had already designed shoes and was a young executive at the family business.

Despite this early success, he deviated from the family business and started singing in nightclubs for tips! According to Joe himself: “I hated the shoe business. It was so dusty and boring, and the people didn’t seem happy. I could sing, and studied voice seriously, and I found that people liked to hear me sing. So I went to Emerson to be an actor.”

For the next several years, he attended Emerson College in Boston and pursued a degree in the musical theater. Midway through, his dreams were put on hold. He was drafted by the US Army. Joe served at the very tail end of the Korean War as a radio operator, broadcasting having been a minor in college.

Louella Ballerino (1900 -1978) was a young mother when she first embarked on a professional design career in the mid to late-30s. She had studied with MGM costume designer Andre Ani (over 40 films, c. 1925-1930) while an art history major at the University of Southern California. When her family found themselves in financial difficulties after the Depression, Louella returned to a student money-making scheme of selling fashion sketches to wholesale manufacturers. She could make $125 a month from these drawings.

At the same time, Louella enrolled in pattern-making and tailoring courses at the Frank Wiggins Trade High School, Los Angeles, while gaining practical experience working in a prestigious custom dress shop.

Louella’s designs started to be used in the dress shop too, while at the Institute, her teachers decided to promote her to tutor classes in Fashion Theory.

After gaining further experience with manufacturers, Louella started her own custom business in partnership with a friend in the late 30s or c. 1940. The partnership later became a solo venture, illustrating the instability of a design-business without a full industrial co-producer, or a moneyed backer.
But apart from being fostered by the academic art school atmosphere, Louella Ballerino seems to have drawn strength and commercial support from the local California design movement, a trend driven both by the West coast lifestyle and the response to it by a new wave of fashion designers and manufacturers, a group of ‘Californian Fashionistas’ with whom Louella consistently showed her designs through the late 40s.

Tina Leser (1910 – 1986) was born Christina Wetherill Shillard-Smith. She was the daughter of an affluent Philadelphia stockbroker and his artist wife. The family traveled widely and, as a young child, Tina visited Asia, Europe and Africa and, for a time, actually lived in India. When it came time to choose a career, she settled on art school, and first attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and then the Sorbonne, in Paris.

In 1931, at the age of 21, Tina married Curtin Leser, and the two of them moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. It was here that Tina Leser began her career in fashion. She opened a shop in 1935, in which she sold clothing that she designed. Leser used native Hawaiian and imported Filipino fabrics to construct sportswear, day wear and gowns. She then worked with a process to hand-block designs onto sailcloth. As an artist, she often hand-painted a fabric to order. A customer might order a special skirt with the family pet hand-painted on it.

In 1940, Tina Leser went to New York on a buying trip and to try and sell her designs. Partly through the influence of Harper’s Bazaar editor, Carmel Snow, she placed an order with Saks for 500 garments. She continued to live and work in Honolulu, but in 1941 she decided to open a business in New York. She closed her Honolulu store in 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and moved to New York. There she ran her company until the next year, when she became the designer at Edwin H. Foreman. It was at Foreman that Tina Leser developed the international style for which she became famous.