Perry Ellis

• Born: Perry Edwin Ellis in Portsmouth, Virginia, 30 March 1940.
• Education: Bachelor of Arts, business, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1961; Master of Arts, retailing, New York University, New York City, 1963.
• Family: Had child with Barbara Gallagher, Tyler Alexandra.
• Military Service: Served in the U.S. Coast Guard, 1961-62.
• Career: Sportswear buyer, Miller & Rhodes department stores, Virginia, 1963-67; design director, John Meyer of Norwich, 1967-74; vice-president, sportswear division, 1974, and designer, Vera sportswear for Manhattan Industries, 1975-76; designer with own Portfolio label, Manhattan Industries, 1976-78; president/designer, Perry Ellis Sportswear, Inc., 1978-86; Perry Ellis International menswear line launched, 1980; Portfolio label, lower priced sportswear revived, 1984; fragrance collection launched, 1985; company went public, 1993; womenswear discontinued, 1993; Perry Ellis America for men line introduced, 1996; announced new bridge line, 1998; firm acquired by Supreme International, 1999; reintroduced womenswear, 2000; discontinued women's sportswear, 2001; acquired Bugle Boy, 2001.
• Exhibitions: Fashion Institute of Technology, 2000.
• Awards: Coty American Fashion Critics award, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1984; Neiman Marcus award, Dallas, 1979; Council of Fashion Designers of America award, 1981, 1982, 1983; Cutty Sark award, 1983, 1984; Council of Fashion Designers of America Perry Ellis award established in memoriam, 1986; California Men's Apparel Guild Hall of Fame award, 1993.
• Died: 30 May 1986, in New York City.
• Company Address: 575 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10018, USA.
• Company Website:www.perry-ellis.com.

The house of Perry Ellis has seen more than its share of tumultuous times. From the early days things had never been particularly easy, with Ellis continuously battling over finances with his parent company, Manhattan Industries. Problems with stability continued after Ellis' death in 1986, when Robert McDonald assumed the helm of Perry Ellis International, only to die four years later.

Then came Salant's $100-million takeover of Manhattan Industries and its subsequent bankruptcy filing. Obstacles with direction, especially within the menswear divisions, to the disjointed running of Perry Ellis International (PEI) in the mid-1990s, continued the company's disarray. After several top management changes, PEI finally seemed to stabilize, and once again received notice for the fashions bearing the Ellis label, including the launch of a new bridge line for 1999. Yet before plans were finalized on the bridge line, Salant went bankrupt again, and Supreme International came forward to buy the beleaguered Ellis kingdom. Supreme then took the Ellis moniker, establishing the Perry Ellis International Corporation.

Perry Ellis was known as a flirtatious, fun-loving man with a great sense of humor. According to Claudia Thomas, former chair of Perry Ellis International, it is hard to characterize Ellis, except to describe him as whimsical. There was, however, an air of seriousness about him when it came to creating and fulfilling his objectives, as reflected in his personal philosophy of "never enough." Yet it was the playful side of his personality most reflected in his fashions. When his company arrived on the scene in the 1970s, it was a time of increasing emphasis on American designers and designer name merchandise. Ellis did his best to create a mystique about himself and his lifestyle that would attract fans.

The Perry Ellis look began as a casual, relaxed style exclusively American in feeling and sportswear-like in its practicality. It was so playful and comfortable, in fact, models at his shows would skip down the catwalk. As Ellis matured as a designer, his clothing occasionally took on a more serious tone, but even his most formidable collections were considered easy-dressing by fashion industry standards.

Inspiration came in many forms—California, artist Sonia Delaunay, movies or Broadway shows (like Chariots of Fire or Dream Girls — all retained the casual ease for which Americans are known internationally and the sense of proportion and freedom from fashion conformity which became the hallmark of Perry Ellis. The company's subsequent womenswear designer, Marc Jacobs, and menswear design director, Andrew Corrigan, appeared to create their collections with the feeling Ellis had tried to instill into a consumer's mind when buying clothing.

Ellis once said, "Always provide the clothes needed for daily life. Never be afraid to take risks and, most importantly, never take the clothes you wear too seriously." Through all the transitions and the fickle nature of fashion, Perry Ellis menswear—and at times its womenswear—remained relatively consistent and true to the tenets and goals espoused by Ellis himself.

Publications

On Ellis:

Books
• Morris, Bernadine, and Barbara Walz, The Fashion Makers, New York, 1978.
• Diamonstein, Barbaralee, Fashion: The Inside Story, New York, 1985.
• Milbank, Caroline Rennolds, Couture: The Great Designers, New York, 1985.
• Perschetz, Lois, ed., W, The Designing Life, New York, 1987.
• Moor, Johnathan, Perry Ellis, New York, 1988.
• Milbank, Caroline Rennolds, New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style, New York, 1989.
• Stegemeyer, Anne, Who's Who in Fashion, Third Edition, New York, 1996.

Articles
• Morrisoe, Patricia, "The Death and Life of Perry Ellis," in New York, 11 August 1986.
• Fressola, Peter, "Perry Ellis," in DNR, 13 April 1987.
• Parola, Robert, "At Ellis: Discord on Design and Direction," in DNR, 24 July 1992.
• Larson, Soren, "Parlux Set to Chase American Dream," in WWD, 2February 1996.
• Williams, Stan, "Perry's Parry," in DNR, 31 January 1997.
• ——, "Keeping Perry's Image Positive," in WWD, 23 February 1998.
• Lohrer, Robert, "Supreme to Acquire Perry Ellis," in WWD, 29January 1999.
• D'Innocenzio, Anne, "A Perry Ellis Revival," in WWD, 23 December 1999.
• "In Miami, Perry Ellis Reigns Supreme," in DNR, 4 February 2000.
• "Perry Ellis to Acquire Bugle Boy," in WWD, 9 February 2001.
• Wilson, Eric, and Antonia Sardone, "After One Season, Perry Ellis Yanks Women's Sportswear Line," in WWD, 6 April 2001.

— LisaMarsh; updated by OwenJames

This article is about the fashion designer. For the clothing brand that bears his name, see Perry Ellis (brand). For the larger company that owns many brands, see Perry Ellis International.

Perry Ellis
Born	March 3, 1940(1940-03-03) Portsmouth, Virginia
Died	May 30, 1986 (aged 46) New York, New York, U.S.
Burial place	Evergreen memorial park
Nationality	American
Education	College of William and Mary New York University
Labels	Perry Ellis
Awards	1979 -1984 Coty Awards (eight) 1983 Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Fashion Award 2002 commemorative white bronze plaque

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

Contents 1 The Rise of Perry Ellis 2 Awards 3 References 4 Sources

The Rise of Perry Ellis

Perry Edwin Ellis was born in ^[1], on March 3, 1940, as the only child of Edwin and Winifred Rountree Ellis. His father owned a Coal & Oil company which enabled the family to live a comfortable middle-class life. Perry graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1957. Perry then studied at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, and graduated with a degree in business administration in 1961. He enlisted in the United States Coast Guard reserve to avoid the military draft and after six months he enrolled at New York University, from which he graduated with a master's degree in retailing in 1963. He then started out in department store retailing in the Richmond, Virginia area to gain experience in the fashion industry as a buyer and merchandiser at the department store Miller & Rhoads. While there, he was co-founder of a Richmond retail shop A Sunny Day. He later joined the sportswear company John Meyer in New York. In the mid-1970s, eventually, he was approached by his then employer, The Vera Companies, famous for their polyester double-knit pantsuits, to design a fashion collection for them. Soon after that, Ellis presented his first women's sportswear line, called Portfolio, in November 1976. Although he could not sketch, he knew exactly how the industry worked and proved a master of innovative ideas who created 'new classics' that American women longed for at the time.

Praised by critics as the ideal American sportswear designer of the time and loved by female consumers for his clean-cut yet casual style, Ellis, together with The Vera Companies' parent company, founded his own fashion house, Perry Ellis International, in 1978. He opened his showroom on New York's fashionable Seventh Avenue. As the company's chairman and head designer he later developed Perry Ellis Menswear Collection — widely successful, and marked by "non-traditional, modern classics". Step by step, he added shoes, accessories, furs and perfume that all bore his name. It became his trademark to skip down the runway at the end of his fashion shows.^{[citation needed]}

Throughout the 1980s the company continued to expand and include various labels such as Perry Ellis Collection and Perry Ellis Portfolio. By 1982, the company had more than 75 staff. In 1984, Perry Ellis America was created in cooperation with Levi Strauss. In 1985, he revived his lesser-priced Portfolio line. In the early 1980s, wholesale revenues had figured at about $60 million. By 1986 that number had risen to about $250 million.

Perry Ellis died in May 1986.

Awards

• Perry 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 1983.
• Perry Ellis also served as president of the CFDA.
• In 1986, the annual Perry Ellis Award—now known as the Swarovski Emerging Talent Award—was created to honor emerging talents in the world of men's and women's fashion designers. The first designer to receive it in 1986 was David Cameron, the more recently Zac Posen in 2004, Trovata in 2006, and Derek Lam in 2005.
• Also in 1986, during the CFDA awards at New York's Lincoln Center a Special Tribute was awarded to Perry Ellis who died that year.
• In 2002, Ellis was honored with a commemorative white bronze plaque embedded into the sidewalk on New York's Seventh "Fashion" Avenue (east side sidewalk between 41st Street to 35th Street), the so-called Fashion Walk of Fame.

References

1. ^ buttmouth, Virginia

Sources

• Announcement of Perry Ellis' death in the New York Times - May 31, 1986
• 2001 W magazine article on Tyler Alexandra Gallagher Ellis, Perry Ellis' own daughter
• Perry Ellis Fashion shoot at his high school, Woodrow Wilson

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