American Scene in Texas: Ostentation Meets Elegance

By Jane O''Reilly

Diana Tatum is a model. She is 5 ft. 8 in. tall, and she normally weighs 117 lbs. For the presentation of the James Galanos spring collection at Neiman- Marcus in Houston, she weighed 107 lbs. The look, the body for Galanos, is a flat front, a flat behind and no waist, she says. "His show is very prestigious. If you can do this one, you are automatically booked for everything. That is why everyone diets so hard beforehand."

There are tears when some girls are not chosen. "You work so hard, and starve, and a lot of time it is just bone. It won't come off." The Galanos body has a 32-in. hipline; the adult female body usually does not. Some of the eleven attenuated wisps running around backstage match the ideal. Some require aid such as wrapping their hips in Ace bandages, using a girdle handmade out of half a girdle, layering on support hose--or all three. Galanos cuts his show samples to fit Pat Jones, his longtime associate. In Houston, a model banished from the lineup expressed a desire to force-feed Twinkies to Jones.

Galanos, a small man of 60, given to pinstripes, bow ties, and tortoise- framed half spectacles, somehow evokes the idea of Cole Porter. Known variously as Jimmy, J.G. and Mr. Galanos, he is most often referred to, in the stores where he makes personal appearances, with an awed "He." "I design for a very limited group of people," he says. "Basically, we are in the $4,000 bracket. It is a question of attitude: either you appreciate quality or you don't."

One of his ladies is Nancy Reagan, whose $22,500 hand-beaded Inaugural gown was a Galanos creation. Diana Ross chose deep purple Galanos glitter for the Academy Awards. For evening, Galanos likes a little Dynasty-style flash--and so do his customers. For daytime, he is tasteful to the point of fusty, although he uses colors more often seen in combination on the flags of developing nations: acid green, orange, black, purple. The great Galanos secret, the almost sensual connection between him and his clients, is the inside of the clothes. Seams are bound, linings finished, and zippers and buttonholes hand set in ways even the grand couture of Paris rarely attempts today.

Backstage, the models are sitting half naked on the dressing-room floors, painting pink and blue Kabuki stripes on their eyelids. The dressers hover over their racks, rolling pink and yellow and gray pantyhose for instant changes. The hat, jewelry, makeup and music co-ordinators stand ready. "Take it off, it's too white," says Galanos, snatching a rope of beads from the neck of a black-and-white coat. The models line up for the opening parade. Makeup and style have reduced them to pure line and angle. They look like fashion sketches of, say, 1936. They swagger out to the runway. Applause. "They do like color in Texas," says a returning brunet, already changing out of an orange-and-black suit.

"The crowd just glitters under the lights," says Tatum. Jewelry winks as hands make notations on the little cards provided with gold-tasseled pencils. Houston is a show-and-tell city. It loves to gossip, and for every woman sitting in the select, reservations-only audience who prefers to remain anonymous, there are two others eager to talk about run-around husbands, face- . lifts and other people's problematic origins. The biographical tid-bits always begin with husbands: past, present and future. For most of these women, their husbands are their careers. The sober choice of expensive clothes is important to both of them, as crucial to the administrative maintenance of their place in society as the hiring of the immigrant gardeners who keep the clouds of azaleas around the house in River Oaks blooming, as significant as the notices on the fences reading ARMED GUARD ON DUTY AT ALL TIMES, as regular as the forays to Jamail's grocery store with the cook and chauffeur to carry home the dips and sauces and racks of lamb. Clothes are an essential part of the endless series of balls by which this brash, arriviste city supports its cultural and charitable urges.

Many of the women speak of wanting to make a personal "substantive contribution," and some of them do. All of them, because they are Houstonians, spend a lot of time making the distinction between old money and new money. "We don't know where she comes from," sniffs old money made even before Spindletop. "You can get in the papers, but you can't get in," laments new money from real estate. The preoccupation with admission to the reigning oligarchy seems to obscure completely the larger distinction between money and no money.

The sales staff in the couture department works for a 6% commission, with no salary. During the show they lead the cheering from the back, next to the table offering chocolate-covered strawberries, white wine and cheese cookies. Saleswomen are as essential to these customers as hairdressers and reliably neutral escorts. "Well, well, at last, it's my favorite," carols a champion seller, arms out to lead a client into the pink, louvered privacy of the dressing rooms. Once inside, the client keeps up the conversation, almost a stream of consciousness, rambling from how her daddy picked her name to her plans for furnishing her new condo to her doctor's decision about her thyroid. Like a good Southern girl, she remains sociable and enthusiastic, even at 65, in her underwear.

Natalie Tirrell, a cool cerebral presence who is Galanos' top model, his "first girl," drifts in and out, showing clothes carefully calculated to meet each client's taste. "That dress is no good, you can't have it," the saleswoman commands, in the bantering tone habitual to women whose living is made by treating other women like rich babies. The department keeps clientele books, with histories of purchases and discreet information on husband's job, working habits, traveling time, ages of children and weekend homes. Thank-you notes are sent, inquiries made about "your darlin' son Marc."

"Darlin' " is a word much used. The dresses are not declared to be knockout, fashionable, stunning or even competitive--but darlin'. An old-money wife in her peppy 70s describes her husband's "little log lodge," where "you can lie in bed at night and push the button and the roof opens up so you can see the stars," as . . . darlin'. A mother and daughter, real estate money, both completely spherical, describe the spring collection's piece de resistance, a long beaded white gown surmounted by a tailored denim topper, for $13,700, as darlin'. The customers do not often achieve the Galanos body. Ovoid or fireplug shapes are commoner, but a secret of these clothes is that they look darlin' on almost everyone.

Intense respect for the transforming potential of clothes is scarcely indigenous to Texas, but there are, as so often happens in the state, regional exaggerations. One of the supreme moments of a rich young girl's life is her debut-year tour of the festivals: the Battle of the Flowers Parade in San Antonio, the Texas Rose Festival in Tyler, the Buccaneer Days in Corpus Christi, where the girls are wheeled around on carts while hoi polloi pay to watch the spectacle. These dresses, talismans of youth and beauty, are preserved forever, or until they take up too much house room. Museums cannot take them all. The Witte Museum in San Antonio, for example, has 250 gowns and now accepts only three a year, provided they arrive with a donation for maintenance.

The River Oaks Garden Club's annual pink-elephant sale probably seems like a suitably high-class recipient. A new-money customer, ordering three pairs of $1,530 slacks, giggled as she described taking one of her old Galanos dresses off to the sale. "One of the girls sent in her Rose Festival dress. She had kept it, and her family kept it, for 30 years. We were thrilled. We advertised it, and guess who bought it? A--you know--a 'man.' She'd be just sick if she knew it was going out to the transvestite bars." It probably looks darlin'.