I.M. Page 14
When Suzie wasn’t onstage I went, often with her, to see New York City Ballet across Lincoln Center Plaza at what was then known as the New York State Theater. The more ballet I saw, the more engrossed I became. Engrossed with the bodies and engrossed with the art form—the structure of it. Shortly after I started my clothing company I was asked in an interview to identify the greatest design influence in my life, and without batting an eye I said “George Balanchine.” The way he solved problems, the elegance, and the way he pared things down. The perfect, logical patterns on the stage—the aesthetic, the thinking influenced me more than anything I’d seen in my young life.
I went to ballet classes outside of school to learn more about what I was looking at onstage. I discovered my love of dance was boundless. I took jazz classes. African dance. In order to learn more about the Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell movies that I was becoming increasingly obsessed with, I took tap dancing classes upstairs at Carnegie Hall with an old vaudevillian who has long since passed away, and whose name I can’t remember. He worked in a studio that was more like an office, full of pictures of him in his heyday with all the greats of vaudeville, most of whom I didn’t recognize. His wife accompanied the class on an upright piano. Classes consisted of no more than four people at a time. He sat behind his desk, which was piled with papers, chewing on a cigar, instructing us, shouting “Hop!” and “Again!” and “Brush out!”
My interest in dance resulted in a very developed, very critical eye for the subject of costumes. More than any other performing endeavor, dance requires a real editing of excess when it comes to costumes. The more I look at dance, the less I want costumes to draw attention away from the dancers’ bodies, and the less I want to distort the shapes and patterns the choreographer is trying to create. For that matter, why should a costume distract from the effect an actor is trying to make? Costumes have to add to the picture, add to the emotional content onstage. I developed a distinct opinion in those years about costuming for the theatre. With the exception of a big revue, or a pageant, or a tableau vivant, less is definitely more.
Midway through my third year at Performing Arts, I was approached by a senior acting teacher to help make costumes for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Shakespeare play that would be presented in the Spring Drama Festival that year. The costume shop at Performing Arts was a large square room with massively framed wire-mesh windows, which were impossible to open, looking out on Forty-sixth Street. The edges of the room were loaded with racks and cabinets full of old costumes and hats. The costumes for Midsummer consisted of simple togas and floral wreaths and such. At some point I had a total inspiration for Nick Bottom, who is meant to transform into a donkey onstage. My idea was to weave the donkey head out of twigs, like a basket, thereby revealing glimpses of the actor’s face beneath. The idea (which, to this day, I think was really good) got shot down by the costume designer, and instead we used the stock papier mâché donkey head they kept in a closet for just such productions.
My interest in design was growing, but it was creating a subtle rift between me and my classmates. It felt like my friends now identified me not as a fellow actor but as something else. That decision I’d made in the dressing room with Diane Lane was beginning to solidify, and for all the excitement I was experiencing in discovering fashion there was also some remorse. I was relinquishing my dreams of becoming a performer. I watched my other friends get accepted into the drama and dance departments at Juilliard and Purchase, which seemed like a simple, natural progression. For me it wasn’t as simple.
At that time my priority was to find a way out of the house—getting away from that repressive community and protecting myself from the horrors that lay ahead, when my true self would be revealed. If I was going to live my adult life honestly, fashion seemed like the easiest way to make the money I’d need to escape. At that point my teachers made it clear that pursuing two careers was impossible. They insisted I choose; and fantasies of a life in show business didn’t seem to solve the problem of how I’d free myself from my current environment, one that threatened to suffocate me.
* * *
Once I made the decision, I threw myself into a more practical approach to life. My puppet shows, which had been a way to express myself artistically, were now a means to an end: Making things became about making money. I came up with the idea to create a mobile puppet show that I could take to children’s birthday parties. I worked my hands to the bone on that puppet theatre for months. I mimeographed flyers at my dad’s office and put them in the lobbies of the two shuls. Weird how I had no hesitation about advertising to these people who I felt such anger toward. But they were willing to pay, and I needed the money for the purpose of buying my own freedom.
Making those puppet shows took an enormous amount of energy. On top of the physical exertion of setting up the complicated puppet theatre I had constructed in the basement atelier, the very thing I was doing was evidence of how different I was: a kid myself entertaining other kids. The puppets also made me an easy target for harassment. I heard the word “faggot” more and more.
Toward the end of my second year in high school, Robin Leopold introduced me to a friend of her family’s, who managed the small Madison Avenue shop for Lederer, the wonderful German handbag maker. By that point sketching was becoming important to me. My sketches were no longer just dramatic expressions of women in makeup with big hairdos. I was beginning to love the power of bringing my thoughts about design to life in the form of a sketch. When Robin’s friend asked for handbag sketches I obliged, and she bought two and paid me seventy-five dollars, which was a fortune to me at the time. Sketching was a dream occupation. Think a thought, draw it out, sell it, move on. No execution. No heavy lifting. Later in my career sketching would be the basis for massive amounts of the aforementioned heavy lifting, but at the time I never imagined I could make so much money doing something so interesting. And needless to say it was a lot less backbreaking and emotionally exhausting than schlepping those puppets around Brooklyn. As soon as I found an easier way to make money, I was thrilled to put the puppet-show days behind me.
By my third year in high school my atelier in the basement became more important as a place where I made clothes and sketches. I began selling sketches of shoes to a company located in the Empire State Building called Shoe Biz. It was also run by Syrian Jews. I felt that familiar disdain of working with the very people I was making great strides in leaving behind. But it was good money, and I was good at it, so I was able to separate my love of the work from my feelings about the people I was working for. I remember one group of shoe designs I presented had cone heels, (which were trendy at the time) decorated with leather florettes. It was thrilling to walk into the showroom three months later and see the actual shoes that had been made from those sketches. They were exact replicas in exactly the same colors. A life-altering moment. From that point on I was a goner for design.
In my senior year in high school, I met Haim Dabah, the owner of Gitano, who started purchasing my sketches. I applied the same principles. They needed tops, so I sketched tops. They needed ideas for jean pockets, so I focused there. They were launching handbags, so I sketched those. Whatever was needed, I was willing to try dreaming it up.
* * *
The money I made in high school meant I didn’t have to ask permission from my parents to do things they might have disapproved of. A huge portion of the money I made went to paying for taxis, something few others my age even considered. If the subway was my ticket to freedom, then a taxi was a first-class passage.
More than once I worried about the great amount of money I was spending on taxis; I was afraid I’d get “spoiled” for mass transit. “Spoiling” was something horrible—a fate worse than death in the house growing up. What would happen if I stopped making money and had to readjust to a regular diet of subways and buses? Both my parents constantly warned my sisters and me about getting too used to luxuries. Aside from being the pat explanation that acco
mpanied a “no” when we wanted something my parents couldn’t afford, “spoiling” was generally seen as something to be wary of in life. The Kennedy children, who were my mother’s preferred examples, were not spoiled. “Do you think the Kennedys just give their kids anything they want?” my mother would say, as though Jackie Kennedy were our next-door neighbor. “John-John has to work if he wants a car. Caroline doesn’t get money for a taxi whenever she wants. She has to earn it!” And my father talked about one of his friends who lost so much money when his company went bankrupt that he threw himself out a window rather than live his life without the luxuries that “spoiled” him.
For all my good intentions of being punctual, sometimes I would run very late, and my only alternative was a speeding taxi. It was difficult when I was a kid getting taxis in Brooklyn, but they were my saving grace on so many mornings. I’d run to Ocean Parkway and though it was dangerous—traffic moved fast, it was a major highway—I would hail the first taxi I saw, which would barely come to a full stop before I’d jump in, and we’d speed forth, seconds before being rear-ended. As necessary as taxis were, it was their luxury that appealed to me. The old Checker taxis were especially grand. They were the size of tanks, with backseats like small sofas, ashtrays, actual jump-seats, and never a seat belt in sight. You could fit eight people in the backseat of one of those old cars—two wearing ball gowns.
I took taxis whenever I felt the slightest bit of danger. If there was a dicey situation happening on the street, I could hail a taxi and speed off. Once Kevin and I were sitting at an outdoor restaurant on the Upper West Side when a car stopped with a screech half a block away and two guys came out, one with a baseball bat and another with a gun he shot into the car behind him. Everyone ran for cover while Kevin and I dashed into a nearby taxi and sped away. I have memory after memory of being ill in the backseat of a taxi, holding on just long enough to get home or to an emergency room. If I was coming down with something, had too much to drink, or had eaten something bad, I felt safer in a taxi than an ambulance. Because I lived so much of my life out of the house as a kid, I saw taxis as a kind of moveable shelter. I even thought of them as places to entertain my friends. I couldn’t host parties at home the way some of my friends did, so I felt really good about squiring them around in taxis. When I was a senior in high school, one night I picked up a boy at Studio 54, gave him a lift home in a taxi, and we made out in the backseat. When I got to college I had a boyfriend named Eric and we went as far as two people could in the backseat of a Checker taxi. Later, on dates, the only way to know if someone was into you was to make a pass in a shared taxi home.
My new friends. My ability to make money. These things helped transform me from terrified yeshiva boy to street-smart New Yorker who could support the lifestyle I envisioned, with no apologies or explanations. If there were one physical thing to express the best part—the most romantic part of my young adulthood—it would be a Checker taxi speeding through New York City in the rain. And the more I sped forth, the less I looked back at the community I was leaving in the dust.
12
When I was sixteen I met another muse, also named Sarah. Sarah Haddad was a very beautiful and glamourous woman of about thirty, a dead ringer for Catherine Deneuve, with heavy-lidded eyes and glamourous strawberry-blond hair. I knew my mother approved of her as the leader of a bunch of young women in the community, often referred to as the Jet Set because they seemed to travel out into the world a lot more than the average Syrian. Their racy edge, their glamour and worldly ways, were accepted because they mostly upheld the community traditions and kept mum about the ones they didn’t. My mother was anxious for me to transition away from what she thought of as an unstable life in the theatre to a more navigable career in fashion. After all, my father’s business was childrenswear, which seemed to everyone, me included, like a short jump away from fashion. On top of my sketching abilities, I suppose my reputation in the community as an outsider made me edgy and interesting to Sarah Haddad, and so after my mother made the introductions, she invited me for coffee. We sat in her dinette and talked about clothes—not as a teenager talking to a thirty-year-old but as equals. She showed me some fabulous clothes she had recently bought in Europe, and I remember feeling torn because they were things I didn’t like. She asked if I would design something for her to wear to an upcoming event, and I was thrilled. Imagine a full-grown woman, such a good-looking one, paying you to design clothes for her! On top of everything else, she offered to engage a seamstress to make the dress. This was a dream job.
Even among the Jet-Setters Sarah was exceptional. According to the Syrians in Brooklyn, business was for men only, an idea that Sarah never challenged except in her actions. She did exactly as she pleased and was good at secrets. She never made a big deal about things she did, some of which were against the traditions. She ran her own life, often with no explanation and never any apologies, and in so doing stayed out of the fray of criticism and resistance. She stood as a leader in the community and always had the best parties, the best clothes, and had an edge of worldliness that made even the most conservative members adore her and look up to her. She had grand personal style—that beautiful head, long legs, broad shoulders and an ability to look sexy—racy even—without succumbing to the overtly objectifying sexiness that was prevalent in the community among those women who wanted to appeal to their men.
On the Saturday morning that Sarah was supposed to pick me up to go fabric shopping there was a huge snowstorm. I thought for sure she would cancel, but at exactly the appointed time she drove up in her forest-green Jaguar wearing furs and high-heeled boots. In the car she explained her theory about people who canceled because of silly things like weather conditions. “You know, people like that will never get anything done.” She had absolutely no professional experience to that point, but I knew when she showed up that I could rely on her. The car swerved on the ice a few times, but once we got to the city we had the fabric stores to ourselves.
Jerry Brown was located across the street from Carnegie Hall and up the block from Steinway Hall, which lent it an air of cultured exclusivity. It was a shrine. Nothing like the garment-district fabric shops we bypassed that afternoon, and it made Midwood Trimmings look like a garage sale. It had a serene atmosphere, almost like a temple, radiating a devotion to quality that few would understand today. You wouldn’t go there on a whim. Nowadays if a fabric doesn’t sell, it’s considered passé regardless of its quality. At Jerry Brown good fabrics were considered more fabulous the older they got. Often Mr. Brown bought fabrics and put them away for a while, until they became examples of bygone luxury. He was a collector of textiles in the way other people collected paintings, and he handled the fabrics the way art gallerists handle art: as commodities, with extreme care. Most of the inventory was on the first floor, housed in locked wooden cases with recessed lights that spotlit the fabrics in otherwise moodily lit rooms.
You would never dream of calling Mr. Brown “Jerry.” He was small and impeccably dressed, usually wearing light-colored neutrals, fleshy tones that accentuated his colorless complexion and balding head. He was an intimidating gentleman who rarely spoke and mostly stood in the shadows of the store and watched. His gaze was such that anyone without a distinct purpose and a thorough devotion to textiles felt like an interloper. One didn’t want to be dressed too casually in that shop. Later, on the few occasions when I had business with him, I would wear a suit and tie, and it tickled me that his mostly dour mien changed a bit. He’d smile from time to time and treat me like an equal.
Then there was upstairs at Jerry Brown. If you couldn’t find what you were looking for anywhere else in the world (and I mean the world), you would make an appointment to meet Mr. Brown upstairs, in what was referred to as “the vault.” Here he kept the most beautiful stock of special textiles ever amassed anywhere. Ancient, precious things. Things that hadn’t been made for decades, woven in places that were once known for excellence in textile manufacture.
Mr. Brown sold fabrics from Lyon well into the 1980s, as though it were the 1950s and Lyon were still a textile capital. He had large stocks of those fabrics, which you can’t describe in terms that anyone would relate to today; their beauty, lightness, excellence in handling are from a whole other realm. (This is definitely a personal preference, but I think the best fabrics, no matter how warm they’re meant to keep you, are light in weight. Even a nice heavy flannel, coating, brocade, or an embroidered textile is at its best when kept as light as possible. It’s a lot like a cake. Who wants a heavy cake?)
I still remember some of the fabrics I got up there. One I remember in particular was a sheer, matte, silk velvet that I wish I could have today, just to prove to myself that I’m not insane and that there ever was anything as beautiful and perishable as that. It was like the wing of a butterfly turned into liquid. It had a silk crepe back with a matte velvet face, the whole thing slightly, miraculously sheer. The kind of thing you’d imagine Isadora Duncan wore to bed. And if you wanted lace … Mr. Brown had one of the greatest stores of it up in that vaultlike room. Nineteenth-century laces. Nineteen-sixties laces. Hand-tatted lace from Belgium that cost two or three thousand dollars a meter, which in today’s marketplace would be unpriceable. Reembroidered lace. Lace in the most exquisite colors, which makes the idea of colored lace okay (colored lace usually makes me slightly sick). I got so many laces from him for some of the most beautiful wedding dresses and evening dresses in my career.
Swatching was out of the question at Jerry Brown. Usually a young designer would go out looking for textiles and take cuttings of things that caught his eye in order to either match something to it, or to make a more sound decision later, after a short consideration. And at places like Poli (another wonderful fabric store on West Fifty-seventh Street that is long gone) or B&J, one of the better garment district shops, “swatching” is their stock-in-trade. But not so at Jerry Brown. Even when I became quite successful I would have to put a deposit down and borrow the entire bolt of fabric on memo rather than take a tiny swatch.