Featured Designers

Adrian (1903 – 1959) was born Adrian Adolph Greenberg. As a teenager he changed his name to Gilbert Adrian in 1922. His father was Gilbert Greenberg, who later changed his own last name to Adrian to signal pride in his son’s accomplishments. Adrian started out in costume design working with Irving Berlin and later George White’s Scandals.

He went under contract with Cecil B. DeMille in 1926 and in 1928 he was lured to MGM. Adrian was a workhorse of film design, turning out scads of film costumes of all types. He handled both period wardrobes and elegant modern fashions with great skill, although his period films were more representative of his personal interpretation of period clothing rather than of historical accuracy. He would exaggerate a silhouette, or move a story to a different time period he felt was more in line with current fashion. But Adrian’s costumes were always attractive and very well received.

Margaret Bailey in Those Glorious Glamour Years : “….Adrian was not afraid to test surprising new styles or have a bit of fun with a design. He maintained it would either be fashionable by the time the movie was reviewed or be so unusual that it was exempt from fashion.”
As a film designer, he became a highly paid star in his own right. According to Hollywood and History ;“In 1940, one thousand American buyers voted on their favorite designers. Three of the top nine names were designers from motion pictures; Adrian, Travis Banton, and Howard Greer”. Adrian had that kind of recognition.

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.

Helen Rose (1904 – 1985) studied in Chicago before journeying to Los Angeles in 1929. She started with Ice Follies costumes and designed musical sequences for Fox under the direction of Fanchon and Marco. She went to Twentieth Century Fox in 1943 and signed with MGM in 1944.

Rose stayed with MGM until the 1960s. She was much admired by the stars of the 1950s, especially the younger women she dressed while Irene tended to the more established players. She was considered a strong designer for musicals which had become MGM’s focus. Rose’s best film work was fashion oriented rather than historically accurate. As a film designer and a fashion designer, she often used the same fabrics for both, despite the fabric being incorrect for period films. Rose’s wedding dresses became a must for the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Ann Blyth, Jane Powell, Debbie Reynolds, and Pier Angeli among others.

Like Adrian and Irene before her at MGM, Rose often adapted her film designs for ready to wear, even as unlikely a candidate as a Roman Cape from Quo Vadis in 1951. This hooded coat sold for $40 in a fabric of acetate, rayon and Orlon. She also adapted her sketches from The Merry Widow and Escape from Fort Bravo, but they were apparently never produced. One of her most influential film designs was the chiffon cocktail dress worn by Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This dress only had 50 orders at her first showing .

Howard Greer (1886 – 1974) was an earlier designer than Adrian, and as well known in his day. Like Adrian, Howard Greer was credited by Vogue with “a sixth sense about the fashion future.” Greer got his start as a sketch artist for Lucile, Ltd. in 1916. He served in World War I on the front line in Europe, staying in Paris afterward and working for Lucile, Molyneux and Poiret. Greer returned to New York in 1921, and became a costume designer for Famous Players Lasky, the forerunner of Paramount. He designed primarily modern dress films with glamorous wardrobes for the star, no matter what her social standing.

In * Designing Male * he stated: “Designing for the silver screen is a highly specialized talent. The dramatic flare necessary on film is often too flamboyant and exaggerated for private wear, and, by the same token, subtleties of color, fabric and drapery in three-dimensional clothes can be utterly devoid of personality and interest before the camera”. According to David Chierichetti, “One of Greer’s greatest assets was his ability to understand the vibrant personalities of the Paramount ladies, and translate them into clothes”.

Greer’s contract ran until 1927, when he left Paramount, to work in custom clothing and leave the black and white constraints of film.

Wit, innovation, transformation, freedom, defiance, chic—and shock. How many of us would dare to take fashion inspiration from the most iconoclastic of designers?

Elsa Schiaparelli was born in Rome in 1890. A defiant girl from the start, she ran away from home at the age of six only to be found several days later, at the head of a parade. When she was 21, Schiaparelli wrote a book of erotic poetry, shocking her aristocratic parents who promptly sent her to a convent. When she waged a hunger strike they were forced to bring her back home.

The youngest in this family portrait from 1892

Repeatedly told by her mother that her older sister was a beauty and that she was homely, as a girl Schiaparelli once tried to plant flower seeds in her nose, mouth and ears, presciently imagining she could make herself blossom into a beauty. She gradually found love and admiration through the creation of beauty.

After a hasty, early marriage fell apart in 1914, Schiaparelli began to discover her life’s work. Her marriage had taken her to New York, and with the help of connected friends, she relocated to Paris where she became associated with artists and made her way into the domain of fashion.

Irene (1907 -1962) Born in South Dakota, Irene Lentz made her way to Southern California by 1927 where she started in film as a dress extra. Irene studied at the Wolfe School of Design, and opened a dress shop, Irene of California, on the campus of UCLA at the urging of her husband Dick Jones. Attracting the notice of such stars as Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio, Irene caught on and became a success.

She closed the shop at the death of her husband. After spending time in Paris, Irene returned to California and opened a second shop in 1933, first across from the Hollywood Bowl, then on Sunset Boulevard. Her windows gained the notice of Bullock’s-Wilshire, and she went under contract to them as the head of their Costume Design Studio where the duties were to design fashions for stars to wear in films.

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.