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source:nytimes.com
July 3, 2006
Fernando Sanchez, Fashion Innovator, Is Dead at 70
Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times
A Fernando Sanchez camisole and petticoat from the 1970's.
By ERIC WILSON
Fernando Sanchez, a fashion designer who captured the naughty side of 1970's fashion with lingerie collections conceived for elegant boudoirs but often worn in public, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 70.
The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest stemming from complications of leishmaniasis, a disease transmitted by the bite of a sand fly, said Jano Herbosch, Mr. Sanchez's business partner and his cousin by marriage.
Mr. Sanchez was infected with the parasite carried by the fly more than two years ago while traveling in Morocco. He had no immediate survivors.
In 1952, Mr. Sanchez was enrolled at L'École de la Chambre Syndicale, the Paris fashion school, where he studied alongside the young Yves Saint Laurent, who went on to introduce the modern concept of ready-to-wear that revolutionized the way women dressed in their everyday lives. Mr. Sanchez also caused a revolution, more quietly, in the way women dressed in their sleep.
With the collection he started in the early 70's, he introduced dressmaker techniques to slips and caftans so that they transcended their functional boundaries. Things like finished seams and linings made innerwear acceptable as outerwear and foreshadowed the mainstream acceptance, two decades later, of women wearing lingerielike garments in their daily wardrobes.
"It's clothes that you can wear for more than one purpose," Mr. Sanchez said. "You don't have to be stuck in the bedroom to wear them."
He did not consider his designs to be lingerie, once describing them to a reporter for The New York Times as "the equivalent of haute couture." Mr. Sanchez treated his designs as such, staging fashion shows of vibrant moiré robes, transparent gowns and silk velvet pajamas that were followed by evening wear and fur collections. The shows were attended with the same interest as those of more conventional designers — which was not surprising, because they were both beautiful and somewhat risqué.
"If ever I felt naked in public, that was it," the model Iman once said after a show.
Mr. Sanchez, a recipient of several Coty fashion awards and a Council of Fashion Designers of America Award in 1981, was most recently designing collections for Yalla Inc., a sleepwear manufacturer that became his partner in 2003 and will continue producing his lines.
Fernando Sanchez was born in Antwerp, Belgium, where his wealthy grandfather owned a shipping company, on Aug. 9, 1935. His father, also named Fernando Sanchez, died when he was a small boy. As a teenager, he accompanied his mother, Yull Herbosch, to Paris to see the fashions of Jacques Fath, and afterward Mr. Sanchez submitted a portfolio to Mr. Fath, who recommended him to the Chambre Syndicale school.
After working for Nina Ricci and at Christian Dior, where he was hired by Mr. Saint Laurent to design lingerie for its licensees, Mr. Sanchez was hired by the New York lingerie company Warner's to design his own line.
He was inspired each season by his international background and his travels in Europe and Africa. "I draw on my memories of Spain: the sounds of a guitar, palm trees and the indolent dreams of harem life as it must have been," he said.
Mr. Sanchez was very thin, always dressed in black and heavily made up to cover childhood scars from polio, casting a vampirish silhouette.
"He had a face that had suffered," said Diane Von Furstenberg, who first met Mr. Sanchez under the pyramids in Egypt. "But everything about him was so elegant."
He gave lavish parties at his apartment at the Osborne on West 57th Street. He maintained a friendship with Mr. Saint Laurent and his business partner, Pierre Bergé, and bought their first vacation home in Marrakesh, Morocco, when Mr. Saint Laurent moved to a bigger place.
"He was the greatest admirer of Saint Laurent," Mr. Bergé said. "I was very touched by that attitude, because it can be difficult from time to time to accept that your greatest friend, the one you knew when you were very young, became the more famous designer."
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