Branded For Success

James Galanos has long been known as America's couturier. His relaxed yet elegant designs defined American fashion for more than half a century, and his customers have included Hollywood stars like Judy Garland and Rosalind Russell, American socialites such as Betsy Bloomingdale, and former American first lady Nancy Reagan, who wore his clothes with great panache. Last month Reagan presented the 83-year-old designer with the Rodeo Walk of Style award in Beverly Hills, California, remarking, "Jimmy deserved this a long time ago." His designs for her—including two White House Inaugural gowns—go on display this month in "Nancy Reagan: A First Lady's Style," a yearlong exhibit at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Museum in California. Galanos recently spoke with NEWSWEEK's Dana Thomas about the state of American fashion today. Excerpts:

THOMAS: You've come to Paris to see your friend, the American designer Ralph Rucci, present his spring-summer collection. How was it?
GALANOS: I was flabbergasted, it was so beautiful. Ralph is so different from the rest of Seventh Avenue. They're commercial; their clothes all look alike. Ralph is an artist. He's a painter and philosopher, and his fashion reflects this.

You got your start in Paris, didn't you?
I spent two years—1947 and 1948—in Paris, working at the couturier Robert Piguet, who was really one of the top three or four designers in the 1930s and '40s. He had a beautiful couture house on the Rond-Point des Champs-Elys?es with a staircase going up and trompe l'oeil painting. Givenchy worked there, and so did Christian Dior, before me. I had been to fashion school in New York but I wanted actual training—not just school training. I stayed for two years and decided to go back to America.

You settled in Los Angeles and launched your own label there.
I had a shop in Beverly Hills, but I decided to show my clothes in New York because that's where everything was happening. I got a big a write-up in The New York Times, and made the cover of Life magazine: I was this young fellow from California that everyone was talking about. From then on, things worked for me.

How would you describe your designs?
I did my own thing and never melded with the others. What we did was make really beautiful ready-to-wear clothes, really couture quality, mostly handmade. The inside was as beautiful as the outside. We were expensive for ready-to-wear. But when Mr. Givenchy looked at it, he told me, "The quality of your work is comparable to what we do in couture."

Where were your clothes produced?
Everything was made in my headquarters in Los Angeles. I started with a shop near Wilshire, and after a few years moved to a building in an industrial section of town. Not a great part of town but a great building: it had been a laboratory for RCA. We converted it to dressmaking and I stayed there. I didn't have a showroom, but a fitting room, and we made all the clothes there. Fifty years later, I decided it was time to leave and I closed the company.