Gordon Kendall
Texans Love Fashion, We All Know That. Here’s A Look At The State’s Design Legacy You Never Knew
High fashion and post-summer Texas heat seem an unlikely ensemble. However, when the fashion concerns an iconic Texan and its designer has a story worthy of any Texas tale, those are reasons enough to pique any Curated Texan’s interest at any time. Here, our fashion writer and historian, Dallasite Gordon Kendall, reminds us that getting dressed has always been about more than covering; it is about defining, creating, and maintaining a visual self-image, one that others will long associate with that person.
What image comes to mind when you think of that most Texan of Texans, Lady Bird Johnson? Who was responsible for helping craft that image through fashion, examples of which show up in almost every picture of her and remain permanently displayed at The University of Texas’ L.B.J. Presidential Library? Thirty years after her death in August 1995, at the age of 91, Curated Texan remembers fashion designer Adele Simpson, the fashion image maker-in-chief and personal friend of Lady Bird Johnson.
Adele Simpson is now a name from fashion’s past. You will not see her “brand” in the local mall or her initials on any bag. Perhaps, a mother or grandmother might remember suits, dresses, and gowns bearing the label with her swirling signature logo. Texas retailers, whether big city Dallas’ Stanley Marcus, or not-so-big, but essential, Abilene’s Guss Grissom, along with plenty of other dress boutiques across Texas, routinely stocked their rails with her clothing for one simple reason: they sold.
What this New Yorker fashion designer, Simpson, knew was women, what they wanted, what they needed for the lives they led, and how they wanted to look, not just for their husbands, or each other, but for themselves. Fashion-aware, but not fashion’s fool, was her formula. A woman wearing Simpson was a confident one, knowing they were “with it,” but not “far out.” This straightforward approach to design proved successful, as her business remained operational from the mid-1940s until her retirement in 1985, ultimately closing in the early 1990s.
Her design success was due in large part to her ability to edit Paris fashion ideas. An Adele Simpson design from the mid-1970s, for example, might have included a detail suggested by then-hot Yves Saint Laurent’s “Ballet Russes” Collection, the drama and pageantry of trims and tassels and belts and sashes toned down considerably, Simpson employed one defining motif only, making the garment appropriately wearable for the women driving a car pool, or attending a meeting, not sweeping into the Paris Opera at midnight. Additionally, she possessed an impeccable eye, the discerning sense of a connoisseur, which enabled her to find unique fabrics and accessories during her travels and incorporate them into her designs.
The precision of her design skills and her ability to capture the fashion sensibility of her time have resulted in her garments being held by every significant fashion museum collection. An American-made fashion garment from the Seventh Avenue era was indeed a quality garment. As much as fashion can be a value, hers was. They could easily last for several seasons and, as such, were the best quality available at their prices. To be sure, Simpson’s garments were not inexpensive, yet not so pricey as to endanger the budget of the emerging presence of the working woman of the era. In short, women could feel comfortable in many ways wearing an Adele Simpson.
Adele Simpson would have been a name familiar to fashion-conscious women during the time Lyndon Johnson was rising in the world of politics, and, in those simpler days, Lady Bird would have likely come across Simpson’s garments while shopping or seen them on others attending events with her. Becoming First Lady, however, gave her access to the designer herself. It was not uncommon then for prominent women to contact American designers directly and place orders for their clothes. After all, this was the golden era of American-made fashion on New York’s Seventh Avenue.
To be sure, there would be much a president’s wife might not feel comfortable about: the endless number of events and demands on her time, most of which are not in her own setting, being away from the familiar, and all carried out in the eye of public scrutiny and comment. In short, a life lived on a very real stage. Again, Simpson to the rescue. Name another fashion designer who started working life as a vaudeville performer, and a child star at that. Born in 1903, in New York City, she was definitely of the time and in the place to have put to work early “on the circuit”, even dancing and singing with a then-unknown Milton Berle. These experiences helped inform her personal understanding of what it meant to be a woman in the spotlight.
So, during the course of dressing Lady Bird for political events, Simpson became friends with her and, indeed, with many of the Johnson family. So much a part of the Johnson family, in fact, Simpson even garnered coveted invitations to the L.B.J. family ranch. Surviving documents, as shown below, indicate that she was invited for a restful weekend, along with members of the retail Magnin family. She even made a dressing gown for L.B.J., prompting him to quip to her whether he was ready for the “Best Dressed List.” Simpson would later dress Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, and Barbara Bush, among other politicians’ wives, so well that she understood the needs of women on the go and in the spotlight.
Family archives
The testament to that understanding is the fact that various presidential libraries have preserved the gowns Simpson made for these First Ladies during their husbands’ tenures in the Oval Office. As well, such archives as the LBJ Presidential Library and University of North Texas’ Texas Fashion Collection hold many surviving examples of Simpson’s garments, most donated by prominent women. Perhaps, though, the best attribute of Simpson was made by Lady Bird herself, who described Simpson as her “fairy godmother on her Cinderella nights.” How better to remember fashion designer Adele Simpson, an Honorary Texan, as the “fairy godmother” who defined w
hat we and the world have come to recognize as the image of First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson.
