Dorothy O'hara: Fashion and Costume Designer

“Makes women look nice and men look twice” Magazine advertisement, 1957: crepe in black, taupe, royal blue, $55

Dorothy O’hara was a Hollywood costume and fashion designer whose dresses were popular from the early 1940’s through the early 1960’s. During her career she designed movie costume as well as fashionable dresses that were sold a better stores nationwide.

Dorothy was part of an energetic fashion group calling themselves the “California Fashion Creators”. It included Pat Premo, Addie Masters, James Galanos, Edith Small, Charles Cooper, Tabak, and DeDe Johnson.

She was known as the “Sculptress in Fabric” for her dresses that featured artistic drape and fit. The dress styles were termed “step in”, referring to the fact that they were all-in-one with a zipper up the back, making the dresses easy to wear. She also designed crepe dresses that looked like suits, but were in fact one piece (1954).

Newspaper Advertisement, Fall 1945: crepe in blue, purple, green, sizes 10 – 16, $35

Dorothy began her career as a fashion model, a slim girl with red hair she would spend her life working with fabric and fashion. To learn pattern making, she studied at night while working as a model during the day. This training would gave her a opportunity to design for the company where she modeled.

As a movie costumer between 1945 and 47, she designed for starlets at Paramount, gaining experience in creating dramatic designs. She began her own fashion business in 1941 with her husband Hank Lunney, borrowing $800 using their car as collateral. This first venture was a line of six dresses that were produced on only two sewing machines that they bought and installed in their apartment in Los Angeles. She hoped to create couture style dresses in a production line.

By the end of her career, it was a multi-million dollar business sold internationally, producing between 400 and 600 dresses a day.

During her career she contributed numerous fashion tips that were carried in the local press. This marketing strategy would keep her name in the press and on the mind of her customer. In 1949 she recommended a slim skirt with peplum over the hips to create curves in a thin figure and conceal extra curves in larger sizes. She would produce sizes 12 through 20 to provide fashion for larger women as well as the fashionably petite.

Dorothy married to Lunney in about 1934 at the age of about 22. She lived in Orange County most of her married life and died in 1963 at the young age of 51.

“I like to think my clothes are both timely and timeless” (1960)

***************

Movie costumes (she worked on several films with Alan Ladd): Variety Girl (1947. with Edith Head and Waldo Angelo), The Imperfect Lady (1947, with Gile Steele), Calcutta (1947), The Searching Wind (1946, with Michael Woulfe), Two Years Before the Mast (1946), The Unseen (1945), Salty O’Rourke (1945)

Television: Dick Van Dyke Show (My Husband is a Check Grabber: 1963, fashions by O’hara are seen in this episode)


Throwback Thursday: This article is reprinted from an earlier post, July 17, 2012
The written content and pictures in this article are the sole property of "Pintuckstyle.blogspot.com". Please do not copy or use any part of this article online without prior permission. If including information from this article in an original written document, please give credit by linking back to this article, thank you.

Georgia Bullock: a California Fashion Designer

Georgia Bullock was a California fashion designer. She was born in the small town of Whittier, Ca. in 1918 and raised in southern California. In the mid-1930’s, while in college at USC, she worked as a floor model and sales associate at a major department store in Los Angeles. After graduating, she was hired by Bullock’s Wilshire, followed by a milliner and later an established fashion designer. Knowing that she wanted to pursue fashion design, she studied at Frank Wiggins Trade School in Los Angeles. During this time both her work experience with customers along with her technical training prepared her for a career in fashion.

About 1941, with an idea for a basic black dress and $50 in cash, she and her partner Dorothy Phillips started a dress company with this one design. This new company would give her additional experience with buying trips to New York and selling wholesale. This small business lasted two years, so that by 1943, at 25 years old, she was in business for herself. She did most of the work herself in her little factory to start, but by 1945 she was quoted in national newspapers as a California fashion designer and selling her designs nationally. Her business would grow, moving to several factory locations in Los Angeles as her needs progressed. This suit was advertised in the mid-1940's.

“In my own designing, I try constantly to stress fit and flattering lines, rather than the specious and merely startling. I want to give the ready-to-wear customer the opportunity to buy good lines in the same sort of basic costumes (as custom made fashions).

“Now that the designers, newly freed of wartime stringencies, can create radically different styles in great variety, women have an ideal opportunity to choose the unhackeyed, to insist upon buying, not what is the rage but what is exactly right for them.

“California has a background and atmosphere which promotes a new, fresh feeling in our styles” she says. “American women are so different from European women, in shape and posture, and way of life. We, in California, are, I think, particularly well equipped to interpret much that is typically American”. Her philosophy would shape the kind of fashions she designed, always keeping in mind her customer’s figure and lifestyle, working to create designs that would flatter them.

She was married with a baby by 1948, but continued to design. In the early 1950’s she had her own manufacturing plant in Hollywood. In addition, Georgia took a design position with the well known label “Nellie Don” in 1953, located in Kansas City, the largest manufacturer of women’s clothing. It appears that she was able to work from Los Angeles for this venture while still working on her own line.

The “Georgia Bullock” label would symbolize the effortless style of the well-to-do woman who could afford the best in design, fabrics and fit. During this time her style tended toward suave and sophisticated. During the early 1950’s she widened her line to include sportswear with a elegant sense of style. Catering to the country club crowd, she presented her fashion shows on her own tennis courts at her home in Holmby Estates. These fashions were carried by the high end department stores, such as Saks, I. Magnin’s, and Bullock’s Wilshire.

In 1958 her fashions were worn on the Danny Thomas television show “Make Room for Daddy”. This symbolized her connection to the entertainment industry and to her ability to self promote as well.

Her career continued to grow, with clients nationally. By the early 1960’s, she was living in Malibu, creating fashions for the California beach, country club and resort lifestyle.

In an important move, in 1963 she launched her “Miss Georgia” line. These designs were less expensive with price points around $50 (her “Georgia Bullock” label sold for twice that). They were more fitted, showing clean lines, long sleeves or capped sleeves, while her own label was more complex and fashion forward.

Career Highlights:

1961: Bright cotton prints were shown for patio, poolside and at home dresses were seen to knee or ankle length with hem flounce. Georgia kept artist smocks in her lines for at-home wear, often in gay prints. Wraparound dresses, jackets in printed cottons, pants and long slim dresses with adjustable belts were also popular.

Mid-1960’s “Barefoot styles”: she described her at-home fashions as something that should be worn barefoot, much like her own beach lifestyle. It included artist smocks, eyelet pants, and hostess dresses for the bare foot.

1964: Her high end line showed the“costume look” with a jacket or coat and dress in slim sheaths, princess lines, pleated styles, lowered waistlines. Overblouse silhouettes and longer jackets to hide hips were part of her figure flattering strategy.

In 1966 she would receive the Designer of the Year award for her work. Georgia’s final years as a designer were in the 1970’s. At that time she continued to show her lines at her home, then in Palm Springs or at the beach town of Carlsbad.

Georgia Bullock was considered a couture designer for the designs under her own label, never sacrificing quality fabrics and styling or catering to fads. She continued to live in southern California until her passing in 1991. During her career, her name was well known nationally and she had full page magazine advertisements. Overall, she will be known for her classics: designed with a good fit and in fine fabrics. Georgia’s designs were was popular for her blazers and jackets, sheath dresses and ensembles, but also the colorful casual lines, designed for her own California lifestyle.

Bonnie Cashin: 1949 Coat Patent with Design Details

The well known mid-century American fashion designer, Bonnie Cashin, began to find her signature style in the late 1940's, and this design patent from 1949 shows two of her popular design elements together in one garment.

The Noh coat, an Asian inspired garment would be part of her 'look' for decades. In this design we find it in its early stages of development. The silhouette is consistent with her later designs. As this look developed, she would venture further into a timeless cut by excluding the bust dart that starts on the the shoulder seam. That would create a flat pattern, without shaping.

This is a draft taken from a later Noh coat, dated from the early 1970's. Here her classic lines are seen: a flat coat that is cut with the sleeves in one with the body.  Like the coat from 1949, it includes a small mandarin collar and large, roomy pockets.

This helps us to see how Bonnie Cashin refined her early designs to reach a style that she felt was classic and suitable to her range of textiles, colors and layering concepts.

The other design element in the 1949 patent that became part of the Cashin design vocabulary is the concept of using a clasp purse as a pocket. This diagram shows the clasp coin purse open, the full coat draft shows that same purse folded forward. This delightful and quirky detail continued to appear in designs through out her career, including the leather handbags she would design for Coach. An example from 1954 showing a plaid skirt with purse pocket is on the MET website HERE.

So, this coat patent may be of a style that might seem fairly typical for the late 1940's or 1950's, but upon closer inspection it is a key starting point in the signature style of a major American fashion designer, Bonnie Cashin.

Dorothy O'hara: California Fashion Designer

“Makes women look nice and men look twice” Magazine advertisement, 1957: crepe in black, taupe, royal blue, $55
Dorothy O’hara was a Hollywood designer whose dresses were popular from the early 1940’s through the early 1960’s. During her career she designed movie costume as well as fashionable dresses that were sold a better stores nationwide.

Dorothy was part of an energetic fashion group calling themselves the “California Fashion Creators”. It included Pat Premo, Addie Masters, James Galanos, Edith Small, Charles Cooper, Tabak, and DeDe Johnson.

She was known as the “Sculptress in Fabric” for her dresses that featured artistic drape and fit. The dress styles were termed “step in”, referring to the fact that they were all-in-one with a zipper up the back, making the dresses easy to wear. She also designed crepe dresses that looked like suits, but were in fact one piece (1954).

Newspaper Advertisement, Fall 1945: crepe in blue, purple, green, sizes 10 – 16, $35

Dorothy began her career as a fashion model, a slim girl with red hair she would spend her life working with fabric and fashion. To learn pattern making, she studied at night while working as a model during the day. This training would gave her a opportunity to design for the company where she modeled.

As a movie costumer between 1945 and 47, she designed for starlets at Paramount, gaining experience in creating dramatic designs. She began her own fashion business in 1941 with her husband Hank Lunney, borrowing $800 using their car as collateral. This first venture was a line of six dresses that were produced on only two sewing machines that they bought and installed in their apartment in Los Angeles. She hoped to create couture style dresses in a production line.

By the end of her career, it was a multi-million dollar business sold internationally, producing between 400 and 600 dresses a day.

During her career she contributed numerous fashion tips that were carried in the local press. This marketing strategy would keep her name in the press and on the mind of her customer. In 1949 she recommended a slim skirt with peplum over the hips to create curves in a thin figure and conceal extra curves in larger sizes. She would produce sizes 12 through 20 to provide fashion for larger women as well as the fashionably petite.

Dorothy married to Lunney in about 1934 at the age of about 22. She lived in Orange County most of her married life and died in 1963 at the young age of 51.

“I like to think my clothes are both timely and timeless” (1960)


Movie costumes(She worked on several films with Alan Ladd): Variety Girl (1947. with Edith Head and Waldo Angelo), The Imperfect Lady (1947, with Gile Steele), Calcutta (1947), The Searching Wind (1946, with Michael Woulfe), Two Years Before the Mast (1946), The Unseen (1945), Salty O’Rourke (1945)

Television: Dick Van Dyke Show (My Husband is a Check Grabber: 1963, fashions by O’hara are seen in this episode)


Copyright, 2012: The written content and pictures in this article are the sole property of "Pintuckstyle.blogspot.com". Please do not copy or use any part of this article online without prior permission. If including information from this article in an original written document, please give credit by linking back to this article, thank you.