~
According to Wikipedia, his father was a frustrated artist who ran a restaurant in southern
New Jersey,
where Galanos had his first glimpses of well-dressed women. Galanos
recalled that he was "a loner, surrounded by three sisters. I
never sewed; I just sketched. It was simply instinctive. As a young boy I
had no fashion influences around me but all the while I was dreaming of
Paris and New York."
James Galanos - 1975
photo by Richard Avedon
On
Oct.
25, 1985, Galanos staged a promotional fashion show for his ready-to-wear designs accessorized by Cartier with informal modeling in the elegant Landmark Lobby of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, California. I was production coordinator for the event.
Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to meet Galanos himself; during the production planning I dealt with "his people". But it was exciting on the night of the event to watch the gorgeous models in the elegant Galanos designs descend the ornate staircase flanked by beautiful marble columns . . .
.
. . then wend their way through the equally elegant crowd with the men
in their tuxedos and and the women in evening gowns. Of course, many of
the women were wearing designs by Galanos.
~ ~ ~
In 1942
James Galanos went to
New York City intending to enroll at a school headed by
Barbara Karinska,
the great Russian stage designer and costumer. When the school failed
to open in the autumn, he enrolled at the Traphagen School of Fashion,
one of the first schools of its kind. He attended two semesters at
Traphagen, the first spent in general design studies and the second in
draping and construction. After eight months, in 1943, Galanos left the
school because he felt that what he wanted to learn could only be
acquired from practical experience in the garment industry.
date & photographer unknown
In 1944, Galanos got a position as a general assistant at the New York East 49th Street emporium of
Hattie Carnegie but disappointed, Galanos left Carnegie and began selling his sketches to
individual manufacturers on
Seventh Avenue for less than $10.00 per
sketch. Then, in 1945, his former Traphagen style and fashion teacher
Elisabeth Rorabach called his attention to a help-wanted ad she had seen
in
The New York Times, placed by textile magnate Lawrence Lesavoy. "His beautiful wife, Joan, was hoping to launch a ready-to-wear dress
business in California, and they were looking for a designer," recalled
Galanos. The Lesavoys employed him for $75.00 a week and sent him
to
Los Angeles. However, the Lesavoys
divorced, and Galanos lost his job.
photo by Nelson Tiffany
"Out of pity," Galanos said, Jean
Louis, head costume designer at
Columbia Pictures,
hired him as a part-time assistant sketch artist. Soon afterwards,
Lawrence Lesavoy agreed to send the 24-year-old Galanos to Paris, just
as couture houses there were rebounding from the war. Couturier
Robert Piguet absorbed the American into his stable of assistants, among whom were
Pierre Balmain,
Hubert de Givenchy, and
Marc Bohan.
At the Piguet atelier, Galanos met with fabric and trimming suppliers
to choose materials, sketched and draped up designs under the eye of
Piguet, who oversaw his work on a daily basis.
date & photographer unknown
In 1948, Galanos decided
to return to the U.S and accepted a job with
Davidow, a dress-making
firm in
New York. The new job allowed him very little creativity, and he
resigned shortly.
In 1951, Galanos decided to take another shot at California, and
when the opportunity arose for him to open his own company,
Galanos Originals, in 1952, he created a small collection, which was immediately ordered by
Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills.
He then opened his New York showroom where a
Neiman Marcus clothing buyer discovered him and predicted his styles would soon “set the world on fire.”
Stanley Marcus,
the president of Neiman Marcus, agreed and soon proclaimed that the
greatest and most treasured luxury in the world for a woman to have
would be a dress by James Galanos."
photographer unknown
Legendary magazine editors and style arbiters such as
Diana Vreeland,
Eleanor Lambert and
Eugenia Sheppard
became fans, ensuring that he would become a household name within
months. From this first collection, his clothing has been admired for
its particularly high quality, especially considering it was
ready-to-wear, not custom-made.
His
chiffon
dresses in particular made his reputation in the early 1950s, with
their yards of meticulously hand-rolled edges. Many designers worked
with chiffon, but Galanos was a true master of the genre. He draped
chiffon, pleated it, layered it, used flower prints and fabrics with
metallic glints. As tailored as a
shirtwaist dress or as seductive as a
sarong, he gave chiffon a high style all his own. Sometimes he even
gilded it, as in his notable pin-striped dress with a three-dimensional
jeweled butterfly embroidered on the chest.
brocade evening dress w/gold
mesh top
& matching brocade coat.
Buyers examine the fabric of a floor-length bridal gown with floral
appliqué, veil and headpiece from the James Galanos Couture Spring 1964
collection.
photo by Tony PalmierI
In 2002, he blasted the fashion industry for catering to only young women with perfect bodies. In an interview with
WWD he asked the reporter, Eric Wilson, shaking his head in
contempt, "How many women can wear just a patch over their crotch and a
bra? Aren't you embarrassed when you see a young girl walking down the
street practically naked? Fashion is geared only to young people today,"
Galanos continued. "All we see is Levi's and bare bellies to the point
of nausea. There are no clothes for elegant women. Let's face it, some
of the things you see in the paper are absolutely monstrous looking –
and I'm not squeamish. God knows I made sexy clothes in my day, but
there's a point when you have to say, 'Enough, already'."
He reinvented himself as an abstract photographer, in 2006, at age
82, his first exhibition of photography was held to great acclaim
at the
Serge Sorokko Gallery in San Francisco.
The show featured more than 40 photographs taken by Galanos over the
previous several years. The works were mostly abstract, with the notable
exception of a few mystical, mirror-effect enigmatic landscapes.
Much like fashion design, his photography revolved around material,
shape and color. The subjects were crafted by Galanos out of paper or
fabric and then photographed in evocative light, creating subtle
variations of tone and shading.
photo by Nick Machalaba
Galanos was the subject of numerous museum
solo exhibitions, and his designs are in the permanent collections of important museums worldwide, including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
Victoria and Albert Museum in London, U.K, the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in Los Angeles,
Musée Galliera in Paris, France, the
Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the
Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the
Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, the Museum at the
Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, N.Y., the
Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y. and the
M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, California.
James Galanos Dress, Lace, silk matelassé and silk taffeta - 1987
photo by Ken Howie
“Everything he made was beautifully designed and exquisitely
crafted,” said Kaye Spilker, costume and textiles department curator at
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which held a Galanos retrospective
in 1987 and has 106 of his designs, which he donated between 1961 and
1998. “What’s interesting about him is you see the broad spectrum of his
work, from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, from very tailored, ladylike and
conservative, to bright splashy prints. That could be the L.A. effect.”
photo by Frazer Harrison
His designs were a favorite among socialites and Hollywood stars. He
dressed Diana Ross for the 1979 Academy Awards and Nancy Reagan for the
1981 and 1985 inaugural balls.
White House Red Room
photographer unknown
Galanos retired in 1998 and lived in
Palm Springs, California and
West Hollywood. He died on October 30, 2016. He was 92 years old.
