“There is very little clothing that hasn’t been done before. It’s the little extras that make them special,” Perry Ellis told WWD in 1976. He proved this with cool, casual designs that refined American style, blending tradition with creative vision — and fun. Ellis’ collections offered a framework for the next wave of American design and the global acceptance of American sportswear.
In this article, taken from the pages of WWD, on March 21, 1978, Ellis expanded on his vision for the Perry Ellis brand.
NEW YORK — Perry Ellis’ office in 1411 Broadway is in the state of frenzy that usually precedes the opening of a fall collection. Telephones ring, questions are shouted over partitions and assistants rush in and out of the room. A multicolored clutter of sketches, jars of paint, swatches of cloth and magazines cover the office’s work desk.
The Portfolio designer moves through the chaos like the eye of a hurricane, seemingly unruffled by his surroundings. He steps gracefully over a fallen bolt of cloth, picks up a half-eaten vanilla yogurt and calmly begins to spoon it into his mouth. He occasionally runs his fingers through his full, longish hair, but slowly, showing no signs of agitation. When he talks, he speaks softly and distinctly, and he is nearly always smiling.
Friends and business associates of Perry Ellis claim they have never seen him visibly upset, and Ellis himself says he cannot recall ever having screamed at anyone.
“He’s a cool cat,” says Frank Rockman, president of the Vera sportswear division, of which Portfolio is a part, and for which Ellis also designs. “The phrase was made for him; he absolutely never flies off the handle.”
And Carol Horn, a fellow designer and personal friend of Ellis, says, “His personality is the same as his clothes — extremely refined, but at a taste level everyone is comfortable with.”
This combination of perennial calm and understated elegance has served Ellis well. In his third year of designing for Vera, and the second of his Portfolio collection, he is at the fore of America’s young designers, reaping praise from both retailers and other designers.
Says Oscar de la Renta: “His clothes are wonderfully American in their look, the essence of what sportswear should look like, young and fresh.” And Ralph Lauren says he considers Ellis “one of the few upcoming designers who is trying to develop his own style instead of looking like other people. He’s very, very good.”
French fashion entrepreneur Didier Grumbach, who says he is toying with the idea of bringing “unexploited” American designers to Paris, says he saw a display of Ellis’ clothes in a window at Bloomingdale’s and made a point of visiting the Portfolio showroom.
“His clothes have a specific look,” Grumbach says. “It’s different from anything I’ve seen here. And I think any design having a specific look has an international market.”
These aesthetic judgments are confirmed on a retail level. Rockman says though buyers were cautious when the Portfolio division opened for spring of 1977, recent enthusiasm has generated about 500 accounts for the line, most doing “marvelously.” The company won’t divulge Portfolio’s volume, but trade sources estimate it at about $2 million.
Kal Ruttenstein, vice president for fashion direction at Bloomingdale’s, says when Ellis made a personal appearance at the New York store, the response was “overwhelming for a designer who’s not even that well known yet.”
Ellis’ own response to his talents as a designer was initially more guarded. When Rockman asked him if he would be interested in designing for Vera, where he had been a design and merchandising director, Ellis said he wasn’t interested. But he soon changed his mind.
“I was involved with design in the way of selection of fabric, color and prints,” Ellis says. “The only thing I wasn’t doing was sketching. In designing, I found I could make my involvement complete in a way.
Slouched comfortably in a pair of khakis, a drop-shouldered cotton shirt of his own design and a pair of Top siders, he adds, “I always liked the feel of nice cotton against my skin, and I always had a sense of style — not overdeveloped but understated. I’m basically a shy person, and the last thing I want to do is call attention to myself.”
He reflects this personal theory of dress in his Portfolio collections. “I really feel I’m trying to do everyday clothes that are friendly — like a new shirt that feels old and comfortable — and look like old friends hanging in your closets.”
Ellis is much more animated when he discusses his clothes than when he talks about himself. His soft, measured speaking voice, which still retains the slow cadences and rounded vowels of a native Virginian, drops to a burlesque guttural tone when, he exclaims, “Oh, this jacket — I’m so crazy about it.”
As a designer, he says, he is necessarily a precisionist. “I’m so fussy about details — the feel of fabrics, a waistband, pocket length, movement. An eighth of an inch on a lapel can make an enormous difference.”
Ellis admits he’s not as fussy about his own attire. At an art opening at the Metropolitan Museum, he wore khakis, Top siders, a vest and “a tie that belonged to my father.”
“I can’t understand how men can let themselves be herded into a place like a lot of black and white Guernsey cows in their tuxedoes,” he says. In spite of his avowed shyness, he admits that if everyone else dressed as he did, he would change his style.
Accordingly, Ellis says he shies away from looks other designers are doing. He adds he admires the creativity of Calvin Klein’s “special statement” and clothes designed by Carol Horn, Alice Blaine and, particularly, Kenzo, who, he says, “breaks through great barriers and really plunges into new things.”
In spite of his liking for Kenzo’s designs, and a fondness for the films of Bunuel and the novels of Jerzy Kozinski, Ellis says the clothes he designs are “hardly surreal but grounded in an everyday sense of reality.”
Still, he thinks it’s important to bring touches of humor to his collections, such as putting galoshes and rolled woolen socks over thick leggings on his models. “Something a little peculiar is wonderful to the eye, and it adds something human to clothes.”
It is no surprise that when Ellis discusses women he considers well-dressed, he tends to cite people he knows personally, such as his design assistant and one of his models. And adds, “Clothes can never make a woman; they only support something inside her.”
Vanessa Redgrave, he thinks, has “a wonderful, independent attitude that she always carries with her. I’d love to see her in my clothes.”
And he says he will always “admire and respect Jackie Onassis.” He first saw her, he says, when he was stationed at the White House when he was in President Kennedy’s Honor Guard during a six-month stint with the Coast Guard.
“Those were the days of Camelot, and Jackie Kennedy was lifting hemlines, in her red dresses and pillbox hats. I used to look at that woman — you know how her eyes are far apart so you can’t look at both at the same time — and it was magic. I’ve always held that image.”
Ellis says designing comes easily to him, and he works with fabric and color first, which ultimately determine the shape. Inspiration, he adds, comes randomly. “You can be anywhere, and you see somebody doing something that’s a treat for the eye, and your head turns around.”
The designs that have evolved from this process have placed Ellis squarely in the limelight, something which he, “as a private person,” admits makes him a little uncomfortable.
Watching Ellis pose for a photographer shows something of this discomfort as he begins to run his fingers through his hair more frequently.
“Privacy is extremely important to me,” he explains. “I have to have the tranquility of couple of hours each morning just by myself.”
Ellis finds this privacy at his home brownstone on the Upper West Side, which he owns. He describes the house as an extension of himself, like his clothes. It is decorated with comfortable elegance and a range of furnishing including a Chippendale bed and a Queen Anne chest of drawers, which “reflect a lot of movement in my life. It’s a culmination of places, friends and families.”
He says he most enjoys entertaining a few friends, tending his plants, exercising — he runs in Central Park and attends an exercise class — and occasionally dancing, though “never at Studio 54.”
He also likes to travel — to Switzerland and the south of France, his parents’ home in Virginia, and his house on Fire Island.
And he’s developed a recent interest in soothsaying, a result of several visits to psychic Frank Andrews. He says he visited Andrews for the first time just before the debut of his Portfolio collection.
“I went totally unannounced, and he didn’t know who I was,” Ellis says. “But he told me I was an artist, or possibly a designer, and predicted lots of success.”
Ellis says he visited Andrews again recently and was told things “too embarrassing to repeat,” but which all boded well for his professional future.
These predictions may or may not be confirmed. But in the meantime, one imagines Ellis will follow the code which his assistant, Patricia Pastor, describes.
“One of Perry’s philosophies is that everything works out in the end, and whatever happens, happens.”
Pastor pauses and nods to herself. “You know, it usually does work out.”
— Ben Brantley