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 called "a huge turning point" because he introduced new patterns and proportions to a market which was dominated by more traditional men's clothing.
Early life
Ellis was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on March 3, 1940, the only child of Edwin and Winifred Rountree Ellis. His father owned a coal and home heating oil company, which enabled the family to live a comfortable middle-class life. Ellis graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1957. He then studied at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and graduated with a degree in business administration in 1961. To avoid the draft, Ellis enlisted in the United States Coast Guard Reserve with service that included six months of active duty with the Coast Guard. He graduated from New York University with a master's degree in retailing in 1963.
Career
Ellis 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 Richmond retail shop A Sunny Day. He later joined the sportswear company John Meyer of Norwich in Manhattan.
In the mid-1970s, he was approached by his then employer, The Vera Companies, famous for their polyester double-knit pantsuits, to design a fashion collection for them. In November 1976, Ellis presented his first women's sportswear line, called Portfolio. Although he was not a skilled sketcher, 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. He was initially known for his versions of the oversized, unconstructed, layered, natural-fiber, mid-1970s Big Look or Soft Look that was the leading fashion trend of the time, for which he was compared favorably to Kenzo, the 1973 originator of the look. Ellis enhanced this trend by creating substantial, hand-knit-looking sweaters in rough-hewn textures that combined well with the earthtones and loose shapes of the period. He would be known for his sweaters for the rest of his career.
Together with The Vera Companies' parent company, Manhattan Industries, he founded his own fashion house, Perry Ellis International, in 1978, opening his showroom on New York's Seventh Avenue. That same year, he interpreted the new big shoulders of the fall in a way that proved more popular with the US 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 still casual shapes. He explicitly endorsed the trend for layering one set of shoulder pads on top of another, which would become common in the 1980s, as would the flounced miniskirts, called rah-rah skirts in the UK, that he and Norma Kamali introduced the following year. His cropped pants, cropped sweaters, and dimpled sleeves of the end of the seventies were also influential.
As the company's chairman and head designer he later developed Perry Ellis Menswear Collection – marked by Step by step, he added shoes, accessories, furs and perfume that all bear his name. Throughout the 1980s, the Perry Ellis company continued to expand and include various labels, such as Perry Ellis Collection and Perry Ellis Portfolio.
During the first half of the 1980s, Perry Ellis was as prominent a US fashion name as Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. He continued to be known for the sweaters, cropped trousers, and silhouette experimentation that he had begun at the end of the seventies, including the flippy miniskirts that he and Norma Kamali introduced in 1979. He was also known for the very high quality of his fabrics, most of which he imported from Europe.