Geoffrey Beene

From Medicine at Tulane to Fashion School in New York

Geoffrey Beene was born on August 30, 1927 in Haynesville, Louisiana, and described as a great American fashion designer. His training began in an entirely different profession: he studied medicine at Tulane University, but dropped out in 1946, after three years. Three years is a substantial commitment to give up, which makes the change of direction a considered decision rather than a brief experiment. In 1947 he moved to New York to attend the Traphagen School of Fashion. The sequence therefore runs from Louisiana to a medical course, from medicine abandoned in 1946 to a fashion school place taken up the following year in the city where his career would be built. That order matters for understanding the designer he became. Beene did not grow up inside the clothing trade or enter it through a family business; he arrived at fashion as an adult who had already spent three years studying the human body in a medical setting, then chose formal fashion training instead. A designer who has studied how the body is built brings a particular attention to how clothing is built around it, and the medical beginning, although left unfinished, is part of the record of how he reached the workrooms. Between the Traphagen School and his own company stands the apprenticeship that most designers of his generation served: work at a number of fashion houses, in both Paris and New York.

Paris and New York Houses, Then His Own in 1963

Before founding his own business, Beene worked at a number of fashion houses, both in Paris and New York, including Harmay and Teal Traina. Working in two fashion capitals before starting out alone gave him both sides of the trade he would practice in: Paris, the home of couture methods, and New York, the home of the American ready-to-wear business centred on Seventh Avenue. In 1963 he started his own company, Geoffrey Beene Inc., with a showroom located on Seventh Avenue. A Seventh Avenue showroom placed the new company physically inside New York's garment district, where buyers came to see collections and place orders, so the address was a commercial statement as well as a location. Sixteen years separate his arrival in New York in 1947 from the founding of his own company in 1963, and those years were spent inside other people's houses. That long preparation is characteristic of the career pattern in the record: medical study abandoned, fashion school, employment in Paris and New York, and only then a company under his own name. From 1963 the company carried that name, Geoffrey Beene Inc., and the clients who followed were his own rather than an employer's.

The Clients Who Defined His Standing

Beene's clients included such notables as Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Nancy Reagan, Faye Dunaway and Glenn Close. Read as a group, the five names explain his position in American fashion more precisely than any general praise could. Three of the five are women known as wives of American presidents, which places his clothes at the most publicly scrutinised level of American life, where a designer's work is photographed constantly and expected to be dignified, assured and unmistakably American. The other two, Faye Dunaway and Glenn Close, are film actresses, whose clothing is seen on screen and at public appearances where individual style, rather than official decorum, is the point. A designer dressed by both groups at once occupies the meeting point of official America and American entertainment, and that combination is what makes the client list worth recording in a short definition: it shows the same name trusted for public duty and for performance. Beene died on September 28, 2004 at the age of 77 due to complications from pneumonia, a little over a month after his seventy-seventh birthday and more than forty years after founding his company in 1963. The dates give the career its shape: born in Haynesville, Louisiana in 1927, trained first in medicine and then in fashion, employed in Paris and New York, independent from 1963, and dressed, at the height of that independence, by first ladies and film stars alike.