Perry Ellis

At 46 years old, Perry Ellis physical status not available right now. We will update Perry Ellis's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Perry Edwin Ellis (March 3, 1940 – May 30, 1986) was an American fashion designer who founded his eponymous sportswear house in the mid-1970s.

Ellis' influence on the fashion industry has been described as "a major turning point" because he introduced new styles and proportions to a market that was dominated by more traditional male clothing.

Early life

Ellis was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on March 3, 1940, Edwin and Winifred Rountree Ellis' only child. His father owned a coal and home heating oil business, which enabled the family to live in a healthy middle-class life. Ellis graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1957. He attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he earned a degree in business administration in 1961. Ellis enlisted in the United States Coast Guard Reserve with six months of active service with the Coast Guard to prevent the draft. In 1963, he graduated from New York University with a master's degree in retailing.

Personal life

Ellis began a friendship with attorney Laughlin Barker in 1981. Ellis named Barker as the President of Perry Ellis International's licensing division later this year. They remained together until Barker's death in January 1986.

Ellis and his longtime acquaintance, television writer and writer Barbara Gallagher, conceived a child together in February 1984 by artificial insemination. Tyler Alexandra Gallagher Ellis, their daughter, was born in November 1984. Ellis purchased a home for Gallagher and their daughter in Brentwood, Los Angeles, and they come to visit often. Tyler Alexandra was the name of her first line of handbags in 2011.

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Career

Ellis started working in department store retailing in Richmond, Virginia, to gain fashion experience as a buyer and merchandiser at Miller & Rhoads. He was co-founder of Richmond's A Sunny Day shopping store while working there. He later joined Norwich's sportswear company John Meyer.

He was invited by his then employer, The Vera Companies, known for their polyester double-knit pantsuits, to create a fashion line for them in the mid-1970s. Ellis introduced Portfolio, his first women's sportswear collection in November 1976. Even he wasn't a skilled sketcher, he knew exactly how the industry operated and became a innovator of modern innovation that American women longed for at the time. He was first known for his designs of the oversized, unbuilt, multi-layered, natural-fiber, mid-1970s Big Look or Soft Look, the leading fashion trend of the time, for which he was compared favorably to Kenzo, the 1973 originator of the style. Ellis pushed the fashion by debuting heavy, hand-knit-looking jackets in textured fabrics that went well with the period's earthtones and loose shapes. He will be known for his jackets for the remainder of his life.

Perry Ellis International, along with The Vera Companies' parent company, founded his own fashion boutique, opening his showroom on Seventh Avenue in New York in 1978. He interpreted the new big shoulders of the fall in a way that was more popular with the American public than the extreme forties-revival looks emanating from Europe, adding large but soft shoulder pads to his familiar earthy textures in new, slimmed down, but also casual shapes. He may also be credited with instilling the trend of layering one set of shoulder pads on top of another, which would become fashionable in the 1980s, as well as the flounced miniskirts in the United Kingdom, which would be introduced the following year. The seventies' cropped pants, cropped jackets, and dimpled sleeves were also influential.

Perry Ellis Menswear Collection was later developed by the company's chairman and chief designer, who was later identified as "non-traditional, modern classics." He added shoes, accessories, furs, and perfume, which all bear his name. The Perry Ellis company continued to expand and include several brands, such as the Perry Ellis Collection and Perry Ellis Portfolio.

Perry Ellis was as well known a US fashion name as Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren in the first half of the 1980s. He continued to be known for the sweaters, cropped trousers, and silhouette experimentation that he had started at the end of the seventies, as well as the flippy miniskirts that he and Norma Kamali introduced in 1979. He was also known for the superb quality of his fabrics, the bulk of which were imported from Europe.

Ellis first male line in 1980, 1981, explored hand knitwear, enlarged colors, and enlarged Argyle. He began this year to provide alternatives to the prominent shoulder-padding he became famous for in 1978, including capelet collars and top-of-sleeve pleats. He introduced soft corsets and hip-padded versions of the short skirts he had begun wearing in 1979, and he began using fewer sturdy fabrics for shaping. This former Big Look founder of the mid-seventies enjoyed the fall 1981 revival to that style with longer lengths, loose layers, and harem pants with Cossack-inspired hats and capes, but this time the style was more defined, with cummerbunds, stretched shoulders, and tulle petticoats.

Perry Ellis received the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Designer of the Year award in 1982, at a time when his company had fewer than 75 employees. For the spring of this year, he introduced his "Chariots of Fire" collection, showing that he had favored the fall but not necessarily. He tried his hand at some of the incredibly tailored suit styles that had dominated fashion since 1978, to a cooler-than-usual critical reception. He wore high-waisted fit-and-flare skirts and slim trousers with short jackets in 1983.

He lowered the rise of the previous year's high waistband to a degree in Spring of 1984, debuting with his well-loved cropped trousers, cropped jackets, and a focus on long skirts. Perry Ellis America was founded in 1984 in partnership with Levi Strauss, and he revived his less expensive Portfolio product line, filling it with the kind of soft, unlined, comfortable clothing he had seen in the mid-seventies that were then not available with wider shoulders. Ellis' Fall 1984 collection for both men and women was an homage to artist Sonia Delaunay and concentrated on Ellis' trademark sweaters in Delaunay colors. The Spring 1985 collection was dominated by prints and slimmer, more simple shapes, with large florals, revealing cuts, and tunic sweaters prominent. These closer-to-the-body cuts will continue into the year's year, with prints and colors based on Chinese porcelains.

Wholesale profits stood at about $60 million in the early 1980s. The number had risen to about $260 million by 1986.

Ellis was praised both professionally and personally for his belief that "fashion dies" when you take it too seriously." Michael Bastian remarked on Perry Ellis's fashion style that "no one did it better...He was able to be fashionable while still being antiseptic." Bernadine Morris, a New York Times fashion columnist, praised Ellis' tweeds and jackets as "impressive and forever looking" with the "insouciant feeling of a college woman sliding into her boyfriend's jacket, which is a size or so big for her, or putting together a jacket and a pair of pants in colors that aren't quite right," according to Steven Kolb, CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, It helped me to define myself."

Ellis served as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) from 1984 to 1986.

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Awards

• Ellis won eight Coty Awards between 1979 and 1984, the last year that they were given.
• He was presented with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Fashion Award in 1981.
• During the CFDA awards at New York's Lincoln Center in 1986, Ellis was posthumously awarded a Special Tribute.
• In 2002, Ellis was honored with a commemorative white bronze plaque embedded into the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue in New York in the so-called Fashion Walk of Fame located on the part of Seventh Avenue called "Fashion Avenue."