SOCAL STYLE / Fashion : Galanos Cuts Loose : The Designer Says Goodbye to the Last of the Glamorous Gowns That Made Him a Legend

Drivers whizzing past the drab building on the drab stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard in West Los Angeles might be surprised to know that the dapper man saying goodbye to a visitor on the sidewalk is a world-famous fashion designer worshiped by high-rolling customers and museum costume curators alike.

They might be even more surprised to know that a very glamorous going-out-of-business sale is taking place inside. And downright shocked that the price tag of one outfit--even half off--would be equal, roughly, to that of a used compact car. A navy wool dinner suit with sable sleeves from his 1984 collection, once a startling $12,000, is now offered at a mere $6,000.

James Galanos closes his heavily lidded eyes and shrugs. It doesn’t matter to him what the compact-car crowd thinks. He never made clothes for them anyway. Nor sold his name to licensers who would. “What I wanted to do,” he says, “is make the most beautiful and most expensive clothes, and that automatically puts you into an elite, and that’s where I belong.”

This confession of early career ambition is only a half-truth. What Jimmy Galanos--born to Greek immigrants in Philadelphia, raised in New Jersey, trained in Paris-- really wanted was to design clothes for movies. He briefly sketched at Columbia Pictures for the legendary Jean Louis, who created Rita Hayworth’s gravity-defying “Gilda” dress, and later, the much-copied beaded second-skin worn by Marlene Dietrich for her Las Vegas act. But it didn’t work out, possibly because a costume designer has to make people look ugly now and then.

And so, says Galanos, if he couldn’t work in the movies, he would do “the next best thing,” which led to his becoming perhaps the finest designer America has produced in the last half-century.

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It was at the urging of Louis, who had become a close friend, that Galanos started his own business. In 1951, Galanos Originals sold its first line to Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, and soon thereafter to Neiman Marcus and other specialty retailers who’d heard about a young designer in Los Angeles applying techniques of French haute couture to ready-to-wear. Galanos’ trunk shows were renowned for the angst they caused models, who would diet to squeeze into his samples, cut for 32-inch hips.

So who are the Galanos women, with their surfeit of cash and dearth of body fat? Nancy Reagan, of course, who began buying Galanos when she was an MGM starlet, size 4. She wore Galanos at all four of her husband’s inaugurations, two in Sacramento, two in Washington.

“All the socialites of Beverly Hills,” he says, flocked his way after Saks began to carry his line. As did the socialites of Dallas, Houston, New York, you name it. As did the stars: Dietrich favored his chiffon gowns, and Judy Garland wore his black leotard and chiffon skirt on her 1956 TV special. He clothed Loretta Young, Rosalind Russell and Dorothy Lamour. Diana Ross wore purple-beaded Galanos to the Oscars in 1985. Edie Adams, a customer since 1953, owns hundreds of Galanos pieces (“She was, in those days, a tiny, tiny thing, and a big spender.”). Dixie Carter will perform her New York nightclub act in several new Galanos gowns, which were awaiting alterations recently in an upstairs fitting room.

These days, fashion designers tend to be social butterflies, with as much cachet as their famous clients. But Galanos has always been a loner. He has rarely had apprentices because he doesn’t like to teach, and he detests public speaking because he is shy. “I can’t work with people,” he says. “I just have to be by myself.”

Though his collections have won nearly universal praise, Galanos’ snobbish philosophy, refusal to seek publicity and offbeat location have intimidated the fashion press, accustomed to being wooed with rock-concert-style entertainment at runway shows. Galanos, who despises that so much attention is paid the spectacle rather than the clothes, refused even to play music.

“They’ve always said that I’m inaccessible,” says Galanos, sitting in his green lacquered office, amid his many awards and luscious photos of his work by Victor Skrebneski and Richard Avedon. “Not at all. I’m the easiest and very friendliest person, frankly, but I am very definite about myself and what I do and how I do it.”

In 1997, his career was celebrated with a stunning retrospective of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The following year, he called it quits. And why not? He’s 74, he’s tired, he’s financially set, he’s won every fashion award worth winning and the world, especially the stars who have so much power to influence fashion, no longer seeks the kind of glamour the Galanos label represents.

“The stars look no better than the average person on the street today,” says Galanos matter-of-factly. “You want to talk about the ‘40s? Those were movie stars whose whole thing was to look magnificent and glamorous. This is the way they were promoted, this was the way the studios wanted it and this was the way people wanted to see them. People would just gape and reach out because it was something they needed in their lives. I mean, who wants to look like your next-door neighbor?”

And besides, he adds, no one seems interested in making beautiful clothes anymore. “Few people are designing for quality. Everything is for the kids. What you see in every store window is two things: shoe-string dresses and tank tops and blue jeans . . . it’s sportswear, bits and pieces. Just look around, the streets, the coffeehouses. Everyone is in jogging pants, tights and that’s it. It’s enough to turn your stomach.”

Galanos, who still goes to the office each morning, lives in Beverly Hills and spends weekends in Palm Springs, a place he says he was talked into and doesn’t much care for, and where it’s indeed hard to imagine him at ease in his beautiful wool suits. The Sepulveda Boulevard workrooms are quiet; the staff gone, the machinery sold. The first floor is filled with racks and racks of samples, dating back decades, the ones he is now selling at half-price--by appointment only, of course. Up close, the pieces are a marvel of workmanship: delicate silks knife-pleated by hand, crystal beads sewn into precise patterns, seams so perfectly finished you really could, as his customers swear, wear them inside out.

Upstairs, where a $4-million inventory of $100-plus-per-yard fabric is being slowly sold off, Galanos unfurls a very special bolt of silk printed with large Greek motifs. This he will not sell; the fabric is too beautiful, the artist is too special. The gowns he made from this, he says, were “a little shocking, but wonderful.” A moment later, he caresses a bolt of chiffon. It’s a tender and entirely heartfelt gesture.

“You know,” he says, “I look at the fabrics, and I feel I am sorry, and I just fall in love with them, and sometimes I don’t even want to sell. I want to keep them for myself. But what good’s it going to do?”

You sense a bit of sadness, but no regret. After all, says Galanos, “I had my following. I had a certain amount of business. And as long as I had that, that’s all I needed. I just did my own thing, my own way.”