Beene's shows at the Pierre Hotel stirred the kind of door pandemonium one usually saw only in Paris, for a Gaultier or a Montana, his clothes, though still light, demonstrated a certain showmanship. Those seams, with their frequent insertions of lace or chiffon, suggested not only anatomy but also the modern ideal of speed and unrestricted movement. "He thought in the round, about the contortions of the body, the spiral of human movement. Or those designers view the female body much as though it were an insect: in measured-out segments of 36-24-36. "Most designers think of the back and front, which is two dimensional," said the writer Amy Fine Collins, who became a devotee herself after writing a critical appraisal of his fashion in 1988. Although he became known for such shapes as the bolero and the streamlining jumpsuit, and for proposing seemingly illogical combinations of fabric  the fancy with the naà ̄ve  his real achievement was to address the three-dimensional quality of the body. Beene began to look for lighter ways to construct clothes, a search that would preoccupy him until the end of his life. He had achieved modest success with stiff, structured dresses that had a high waistline, a paper-doll silhouette that was widely copied, and for designing, in 1967, the high-necked princess-line dress that Lynda Bird Johnson wore at her wedding to Charles Robb.īut, stung by criticism from the writer Kennedy Fraser, who complained in The New Yorker that his pretty dresses resembled "concrete," Mr. Until then, he had been largely a product of Seventh Avenue, a product of its biases and commercial values. Beene made a radical change in his thinking.
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Beene approached the problems of design  chiefly, the problem of how to put fabric on the human body  with the blinkered enthusiasm of an artist he was only interested in his own evolution. Beene was American fashion's most paradoxical designer: a technician who stood shoulder to shoulder with the great French couturiers a modernist who consistently defied those technical conventions a Southern gentleman who found converts among New York's high priestesses of art and society yet who refused to kowtow to the industry's so-called bible, Women's Wear Daily, with which he had a long feud.Īnd while other Seventh Avenue designers adapted their clothes to fads or sought out high-falutin' references to give them a veneer of significance, Mr.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, Russell Nardozza, vice president of Geoffrey Beene Inc., announced. Geoffrey Beene, a single-minded innovator who put fashion above commerce yet succeeded in making a business from originality, died today at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
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