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At the same time, I enrolled in a handbag design course at FIT to learn specialized pattern-making for handbags, which could also be used for belts. FIT is a very good school for learning basic industrial techniques, but it is a wasteland when it comes to developing styling talent, in my opinion. I was there for a couple of years, so I figure I have a right to an opinion.
I had no clue about Pearl’s leather inventory, and I didn’t know her business at all, so I managed to make a couple of expensive mistakes almost right away. They let me go, but not before I had met Joe Bergman, the union rep. I went to see him at the union office, and he told me that Calderon Belts and Bags was looking for an assistant belt designer. He asked me if I was any good at belts. I responded, “Belts are easy,” which he took the wrong way. Nothing is easy. What I meant was that belts are not as complicated as coats or skirts.
I knew he didn’t think I would get the job. I went down to Calderon on Greenwich Street, which is now Tribeca. Back then it was a deserted, slightly sinister waterfront street. I got in to see the factory manager, Bill Daniels. Daniels was not a New Yorker. He was like an engineer from flyover country. Calderon was a big operation, and the owners must have felt they needed a real American to run the place instead of a wacko garmento thief who would rob them blind.
I showed him my design portfolio, which impressed him a lot. The girls I had used were all professional Montreal strippers made up by a professional French make-up artist. The leather suits I had designed for them were along the lines of things being showed at North Beach Leather, with lots of appliqués and fringed looks, some of them being direct knock-offs of North Beach Leather ads in Vogue and Bazaar. It was a pretty cool portfolio. Daniels looked up at me from the photo album. “Why did you leave?” he asked me, somewhat in awe.
He took me down to the design room to see the company’s owners and showed them my portfolio. They were a married couple, Murray and Joan Nathan. They were hard-bitten old timers who had started producing Mickey Mouse handbags for kids and moved up the food chain to the point where they had a five-story factory producing snakeskin accessories for Neiman’s and Sackowitz. They looked over my portfolio while I shot them my pitch, which now included Accessories by Pearl. Nathan finally told me “Come back tomorrow and bring your sketches.”
Sketches? I didn’t have any freakin’ sketches! I ran to an art store and bought a sketchpad and pencils. After dark I went up and down Madison Avenue, sketching the belts in the boutique windows. I got some good designs. People walking down the street were saying, “This guy should be shot!”
Listen, when I was a kid growing up in Beverly Hills, I lived on Bedford Drive near Wilshire Boulevard, half a block from Saks Fifth Avenue. At night guys would set up flood lights and tripods right there on the sidewalk, with pedestrians walking back and forth, to take pictures of the dresses in the windows. One guy with a sketchpad, that was nothing! Anyway, in the following years I learned everything about knocking off styles that you can possibly imagine.
I went back to my hotel room and copied my sketches into presentable form. The next day I went back to Calderon and presented them to Murray Nathan. He was very impressed. Why shouldn’t he be? They were all the current European styles, fresh out of the most exclusive Madison Avenue boutiques. He took the sketchpad and put it in his drawer. He never gave it back to me.
Now he took me to an empty design room and gave me a knife, a curve and some pattern paper. “Design me a belt,” he told me. I quickly started on a piece I had seen the previous evening. It was a beige contour hip belt 4” wide at the left hip, narrowing to 2” at the right hip, closing with a hook at the hip with a bow covering the hook. The body of the belt was three contour pieces sewn together separated with black handbag piping. Actually, I think it was two belts I saw combined into one. The pattern was a very amateurish job, and the construction was not up to industrial standards, but I nevertheless produced a beautiful-looking fashion belt in a couple of hours.
While I was making it, I received a visit from the sales manager, Ernie Dornbush, who had sat in on one of the interviews. Dornbush was a tall, imposing man with a business suit and a booming baritone voice, exactly the sort of sales manager to appeal to a hick department store owner from Texas who describes things as outré. He wasn’t in favor of hiring me, and he came to let me know it in no uncertain terms, hoping to demoralize me and shake me up. Forget him! I needed the job.
I brought the finished belt to Murray Nathan in the big design room. He put the thing smack in the middle of the design table, where all the buyers would see it. “You’re hired,” he told me. “Come back tomorrow at nine o’clock.” He left the belt in that place of honor for several weeks.
Dornbush was in the design room when I got hired. He was visibly upset.
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About Dean Borok
