In celebration of the opening of the exhibition James Galanos: Design Integrity, fashion historian, author, international lecturer and Project Manager of The James G. Galanos Foundation, Louise Coffey-Webb will be speaking on the designer in the new James Galanos Research Center. Her talk will be illustrated with examples from the recently acquired Galanos Archives.

Once in a century there comes a designer who serves to narrate a particular journey in the tale of American fashion. Such a designer is Galanos – the only twentieth century designer to apprentice in the immediate post-war house of Robert Piguet; and the only American designer to sustain couture standards for four decades without “selling out”. James Galanos’ career took off after he settled in California in 1951, until he retired in 1998. Although the story of fashion in the twenty-first century is changing unbelievably fast, there are new possibilities for understanding Galanos’ uniqueness.