Geoffrey Beene, Couturier Who Approached Design With an Artist's Eye, Dies at 77
Geoffrey Beene, a single-minded innovator who put fashion above commerce yet succeeded in making a business from originality, died yesterday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Russell Nardozza, vice president of his company, Geoffrey Beene.
Mr. Beene was American fashion's most paradoxical designer: a technician who stood shoulder to shoulder with the great French couturiers; a modernist who consistently defied those technical conventions; a Southern gentleman who found converts among New York's high priestesses of art and society yet refused to kowtow to the industry's bible, Women's Wear Daily, with which he had a long feud.
Whereas other Seventh Avenue designers adapted their clothes to fads or sought out highfalutin references to give them a veneer of significance, Mr. Beene approached the problems of design -- chiefly, the problem of how to put fabric on the human body -- with the blinkered enthusiasm of an artist. He was interested only in his own evolution.
In the early 1970's, Mr. Beene effected a radical change in his thinking. Until then, he had been largely a product of Seventh Avenue, of its biases and commercial values. He had achieved modest success with stiff, structured dresses that had a high waistline, a paper-doll silhouette that was widely copied, and he won attention for designing, in 1967, the high-necked princess-line dress that Lynda Bird Johnson wore at her wedding to Charles S. Robb.
Stung by criticism from the writer Kennedy Fraser, who complained in The New Yorker that his pretty dresses resembled ''concrete,'' Mr. Beene began to look for lighter ways to construct clothes, a search that would preoccupy him until the end of his life. Although he became known for such shapes as the bolero and the streamlining jumpsuit, and for proposing seemingly illogical combinations of fabric -- the fancy with the naïve -- his real achievement was to address the three-dimensional quality of the body.
''Most designers think of the back and front, which is two dimensional,'' said the writer Amy Fine Collins, who became a devotee herself after writing a critical appraisal of his fashion in 1988. Or, she continued, those designers view the female body much as though it were an insect: in measured-out segments of 36-24-36. ''But Mr. Beene didn't do that,'' Ms. Collins said. ''He thought in the round, about the contortions of the body, the spiral of human movement. That's why his seams spiral.''
Those seams, with their frequent insertions of lace or chiffon, suggested not only anatomy but also the modern ideal of speed and unrestricted movement. In the late 80's, when Mr. Beene's shows at the Pierre Hotel stirred the kind of door pandemonium one usually saw only in Paris for a Gaultier or a Montana, his clothes, though still light, demonstrated a certain showmanship. ''Those late 80's dresses were like glorious flowers with secret layers and collages,'' Ms. Collins said.
In the 90's, after his move to the stage of the Equitable Building, Mr. Beene began to strip away those dazzling effects, as if aware that he had still not achieved the effect of true weightlessness. Indeed, many of those dresses, with triangular or boomerang-shaped pieces of fabric stretched across the bust and suspended by tiny cords, looked blown on, and in danger of falling with one snip of a cord.
Fashion editors ran out of superlatives to describe Mr. Beene's high-wire act. Harold Koda, the costume curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recalled leaving a presentation at the Asia Society and hearing an editor observe: ''What can you say? It's not like anything that anyone else is doing.''
Partly because of the reverence that editors lavished on him and partly because he tended to hold himself apart from Seventh Avenue, other designers rarely missed an opportunity to needle him. Once, at a party given by Saks Fifth Avenue and attended by many designers, Mr. Beene stopped to raise the collar of one of his jackets on a mannequin. When his back was turned, a former Saks executive recalled, Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass impishly flattened the collar. But despite such high jinks, Blass and others readily acknowledged that Mr. Beene was a designer's designer.
Geoffrey Beene was born Aug. 30, 1927, in Haynesville, La., into a family of doctors. He was expected to follow in their footsteps and dutifully enrolled in the medical program at Tulane University.
''In the South,'' he told Vogue in 1977, ''if you're not a doctor, lawyer, merchant or thief, everything else is a hobby. So the family thought I ought to be a doctor. The first two years weren't bad, because it was classroom work, but the third year we got into vivisection, cadavers, and all that horrendous stuff. And every disease we studied I got.''
He dropped out of medical school and went to California, planning to attend the University of Southern California, but instead took a job in the display department at I. Magnin, a chic clothing store, where he became convinced that his future lay in fashion.
It was not a sudden revelation. At the age of 8 he had bought a pattern for beach pajamas at the five-and-dime and asked an aunt to sew them in an oriental floral of blue and orange. While at Tulane, he had been caught sketching in his anatomy textbook the Adrian-designed gowns that Joan Crawford wore in the film ''Humoresque.'' (He later said that the glamour of Crawford and Garbo was deeply seated in his mind.)
In 1947 Mr. Beene moved to New York to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion, and went on to Paris for intense training in sketching, designing and sewing. He learned tailoring from a master tailor who had worked for the couturier Edward Molyneux.
Returning to New York in 1951, he held a succession of jobs with Seventh Avenue houses. From 1954 to 1963 he designed for Teal Traina, where he developed a reputation for originality. In 1963 he became one of the first American designers to start his own company. Until then, it was the manufacturer's name on the door and the label.
Although Mr. Beene never achieved household-name status, which would have required him to license his name to an endless string of products like sheets and underwear (or even automobiles, as Blass did in the 70's with the Ford Motor Company), he nonetheless had a highly lucrative license with Van Heusen for men's shirts, and another for men's fragrances, including the popular Gray Flannel. The royalties from those products gave him a financial cushion. ''I used to joke with him that he was a true Southern gentleman,'' Ms. Collins said. ''He let the men pay for the women.''
In 1974 he became one of the first American designers to have a secondary line of more casual, less expensive clothes, which he called Beene Bag. Two years later, he took the bold leap of showing his collection in Milan, a first for an American designer. Later, he showed in Paris, Brussels, Vienna and Beijing.
He was less successful in creating a women's scent. A possible reason for this failure was a lack of money for heavy advertising and promotion; his business was never so large that it could support such an expense. He attributed one of his banishments from the pages of Women's Wear Daily, the powerful Fairchild Publications trade paper, to his inability to afford a large ad in Fairchild's slick magazine W.
Mr. Beene compounded the problem with Fairchild, assuring that his collections would not be covered for many years, by allowing one of his homes to be photographed by Architectural Digest instead of W, and later by trying to dictate which Women's Wear editor would review his collection.
Although he seemed mild-mannered behind his owlish black glasses, Mr. Beene was strongly opinionated. Once, when he was dissatisfied with the line a new licensee showed him, he threw it out and had his sample rooms make a new collection virtually overnight.
And even though imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, Mr. Beene was not amused, and kept a file on the guilty, who included young stars like Isaac Mizrahi and Narciso Rodriguez. ''I think it was a compulsion for him,'' Ms. Collins said. ''He didn't like being copied, it felt like a violation.'' He eventually threw away the file.
Mr. Beene's contribution to American fashion was acknowledged in and out of the industry, and by tastemakers like Agnes Gund, Paloma Picasso and Jacqueline Onassis. In 1964, he won the first of eight Coty Fashion Critics Awards. He was the recipient of four awards from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, including one in 1998 for lifetime achievement.
His clothes are in several museum collections. A few years ago, he helped Mr. Koda make a selection of hundreds of original garments from his archives for donation to the Costume Institute at the Met.
Mr. Beene enjoyed good food, entertaining small groups of friends, mainly in restaurants, occasionally in his duplex apartment on the Upper East Side and in his weekend home in Oyster Bay, on Long Island, where he grew 2,000 orchid plants in a three-wing greenhouse. He said he once hoped to have one sample of every variety of orchid, until he learned that there were 35,000. He also had homes in Florida and Hawaii.
He is survived by his sister, Barbara Ann Wellman of Conroe, Tex.
A modernist in every sense, he collected Art Deco drawings and paintings, including works by Man Ray, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí.
He traveled frequently, to the Far East and to Europe, going back again and again to his favorite city, Vienna. He called Vienna his source of inspiration, but his clothes reflected the influence of every culture he visited.
Wherever his thoughts took him, though, he was preoccupied with achieving the seemingly impossible out of plain cloth and seams. ''Designing is an architectural problem,'' he told The New York Times in 1991. ''You are faced with a piece of crepe or wool, the flattest thing in the world, and you have to mold it to the shape you want. Clothing is nothing until it hits the body. The body gives it shape.''
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