Content area
Full Text
NEW YORK -- Donald Brooks, who helped create the "American Look" in fashion in the Fifties and Sixties along with designers such as Bill Blass and Geoffrey Beene, and then became a costume designer for theater and film, died Monday night at Stony Brook University Hospital in Stony Brook, N.Y. He was 77.
Brooks had been hospitalized after suffering a heart attack last month while vacationing in the Hamptons, said Gerald Blum, a close friend of the designer and a former executive vice president and director of marketing and sales promotion for Lord & Taylor. He lived in Manhattan.
"I adored him....He was such a genius," Isaac Mizrahi said. "He was so inventive about color and all of that smart wit. He did all those great movies. About a month ago, I bought a little green chiffon dress of his from about 1968. I was thinking, `I can't wait to run into him to tell him that I bought a dress from him."'
Among American fashion's famous three Bs, Brooks wasn't as recognized for his impact, even though he ran his own Seventh Avenue ready-to-wear business, as well as designing swimwear, lingerie, rainwear, furs, wigs, home furnishings and men's wear.
In October 2003, Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, his alma mater, moved to rectify the situation with proper acknowledgement of "an unsung hero of American fashion."
The exhibit, "Donald Brooks: Designer for All Seasons," paid tribute to Brooks' impact during that Hollywood moment of fashion at the cusp of the Sixties, when designers were making their way out of back rooms to be celebrated in their own right, designing glamorous starlet dresses and matching coats in crepe de chine and heavy black wool.
Brooks dressed celebrities such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Claudette Colbert, Sharon Tate, Faye Dunaway, Ethel Merman and Carol Channing. He was a contemporary of designers James Galanos, Norman Norell, Ceil Chapman, Adele Simpson, Charles James, John Weitz, Bill Atkinson, Shannon Rodgers, Patrick Porter and Herbert Kasper.
Brooks, who was born in New Haven, Conn., had come out of Parsons in the late Forties. He worked for Lord & Taylor doing window displays and then took over for Claire McCardell designing Townley Frocks in 1958. He was a client of public relations...