Julian Tomchin
Textile Designer
(Continued)
I met Donald in 1958. Another of the garments in the exhibit shows a printed linen jacket that was made for Donald by a man named Jose Martine of Couture Fabrics. I did the repeats of those Japanese ladies on linen.
I later had to go up and show something to Donald when he was designing for Townley. We discovered early on that we had both attended Syracuse University. Subsequently, I started making things for him and when I left that company and went to Maxwell, I took my relationship with Donald with me.
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If something went back on the drawing board it was to make a second or third version because each group became a collection.
During the heyday of the sixties there was this very simple dress that just hung from the shoulders, which was really all the rage. I would go up to Donald's office and hand paint certain dresses.
There was the "Elephant" dress which is part of the Collection at FIT and a large series of printed dresses that included tulips and camellias, which were part of his Coty award show in 1969.
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I very often showed him an idea and then his enormously fertile mind would run with that idea and go on to do many other things with that same concept or reject it if he just didn't see how it would work.
Since he has such a good foundation in the history of art and design, it was an absolutely symbiotic relationship. He might pick up the phone and say, "Grapes", but not much more. Then I sat down at the drawing board and we worked on things until he was happy with them.
The relationship was such that I very rarely had to redo anything.
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This was during the time that Donald was doing his Coty show, making his collection and doing the film, Star!, all at the same time.
I'll never forget a dress Donald did for a fashion show for charity. He worked with decorator fabrics and we painted an entire Chinese kimono with a pagoda and everything else.
It took days to do this, but it was never reproduced. I remembered having such a good time doing it. Donald had a hat made that looked like a Chinese pagoda. It was an era in which the clothes 'would move'. You could decorate the body by using printed fabrics.
What I always tried to do when I was teaching was to say, "How does this fabric move? What happens when somebody walks wearing this fabric? What happens when this fabric has to go around a bust line or a derriere?"
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