Symposium Highlights
Designer for All Seasons
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Jeane Eddy |
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So many designers pick a fabric that a manufacturer shows them and they design something from it. Donald was unique in that he created along side print designers wonderful graphic things that people would never think of having in a fabric at that time like chickens, bamboo, feathers.
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Grace Mirabella |
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His clothes weren't forced or rigid. They had a move that was instantly appealing - instantly made you feel good and look good.
If he didn't do good clothes, I would not have cared. I'd look to somebody else but I did miss him because he played a role in American fashion at that moment which is not properly documented.
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Bernadine Morris |
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That's why you couldn't have complicated clothes in America because there was no one to help the woman into it; she had to get into it herself. In Paris there was always someone who could help you into a dress. That is one of the reasons why sportswear emerged and these are the clothes that Donald Brooks provided.
It wasn't just the fact that he changed the way clothes were shown; the air in the showroom was different. It wasn't the rarefied atmosphere of the Paris couture salons, which some designers tried to replicate here. It was friendly and informal and it was the beginning of the democratization of fashion.
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Jeane Eddy |
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Hollywood and Hollywood designers influenced him, to a degree, but there was nothing derivative of Paris in his clothes.
When Donald took me to the Oscars in 1969, I mentioned to my hosts, Swifty and Mary Lazar over dinner that my favorite movie star was Cary Grant. The next night I wore Donald's marvelous white crepe pajama with the gold Egyptian rams' heads [in the exhibit] to a party where I was introduced to Mr. Grant. We had a long conversation and it was all very exciting. Needless to say, I shall never relinquish that particular pair of pajamas.
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Gerald Blum |
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I always admired Donald's clothes because I thought, like Claire McCardell's, they were the kind of clothes that were very Lord & Taylor. You have to realize that spending forty years in a particular store I have a little narrowness about fashion. Those feelings were very much in a sportswear vein, not that Donald was a sportswear designer, but that his designs had fluidity and movement.
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June Weir |
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The clothes were not from someone's archives but they were from women's private wardrobes.These are fifty, forty or thirty year old clothes and to think that women thought so highly of those pieces that they wouldn't allow them out of their house.
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panel | dialogue | photos |
