A resolute modernist and designer’s designer who works in a mixture of mediums, Geoffrey Beene is a quiet thinker with a soft southern accent, who calls his clothes ‘liquid geometry’. Beene claims he did not leave but ‘fled’ Haynesville to study medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans and Los Angeles from 1943–6. He decided to switch to fashion after being mesmerized by Gilbert Adrian’s designs for Joan Crawford in Humoresque (1946). Beene worked in the display department of the I Magnin store in Los Angeles and studied at Traphagan School of Fashion in New York before moving to Paris, where he studied at L’Académie Julian with a tailor who had worked with Edward Molyneux. In 1951 Beene left Paris, working with the designer Teal Traina before launching Geoffrey Beene Inc. in 1963.
Geoffrey Beene has always defied convention: in 1966 he was putting grey flannel and wool jersey into eveningwear, predicting jumpsuits would be the future of fashion and making sequinned sportswear. He launched Beenebag, one of America’s first diffusion lines, in 1971. In 1976 he was the first American designer to show in Milan, prompting L’Uomo Vogue to issue a warning: ‘Look out Italian designers. This is the future.’ Beene was famously made persona non grata by buyer’s bible Women’s Wear Daily in 1967 – allegedly because he wouldn’t give advance details of the wedding dress he had designed for Lynda Bird Johnson. ‘I felt my allegiance was to the President,’ he told Vogue in 1987. The ensuing feud lasted for decades. This would have been commercial suicide for most designers, but not for Beene, who survived with a hard-core clientele and a sense of humour: ‘I’ve been called a lot of things other than Mr Beene, believe me.’
With eight Coty Awards under his belt, Beene has been both employer and mentor to some of the most talented American designers, including Gene Mayer, Alber Elbaz and Issey Miyake – Japan’s forefather of aesthetic dressing. His talents are not confined to fashion. Beene also designs furniture, shoes and accessories, and has cultivated a collection of over 2,000 orchids. Despite being on the board of the American Ballet Theatre, he had never designed dance costumes until he was commissioned by Twyla Tharp Company for the 1999 dance work Diabelli.
Beene is one of fashion’s thinkers, a revolutionary, a fabric technologist, who lives a solitary existence with two dachshunds. He hates looking back. ‘The future of fashion is performance,’ Beene told Life. ‘Clothes will be packable, versatile and practically weightless. I said about 10 years ago that the major change in fashion will come about when the chemist meets with the artist.’
