Pauline Trigère Fashion Designer Born November 5, 1908
As her clothing designs become hot property on the vintage market, Pauline Trigère is applying her couture sensibility to new projects--like black-tie canes.

Fashion designer Pauline Trigère brought style to American women by marrying European couture skills to American pragmatism. And through sheer force of character, she embodied style itself. For nearly 60 years Trigère has been recognizable for her impeccable coif, tinted eyeglasses, and turtle-shaped accessories. She established a multimillion-dollar business, raised two sons by herself, and took a lifelong lover nine years her junior. The woman in red--the five-foot, four-inch center of attention--is, at 92 as much as ever, Trigère.

Like her garments, Trigère's career defies a fundamental tenet of fashion simply by enduring. Though she no longer designs clothes, Trigère markets her perfume Liquid Chic, launched in 1973, and designs accessories and scarves. From 1942, when she and her brother Robert founded Trigère Inc. (later called Pauline Trigère) with 11 dresses made from borrowed fabric, to 1988, when dramatic changes in the industry left her too broke to mount a collection, the designer and her clothes have remained in vogue. During those five decades she became one of America's most important designers, winning the Coty American Fashion Critics Award four times, and being inducted into its Hall of Fame in 1959. Fifty years after opening its doors, Pauline Trigère became the longest-running business in Seventh Avenue history. One year later, in 1993, Trigère received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

"Her designs were very flattering to women. The technique was decidedly European--her respect for fabric, her originality. She draped," says designer Geoffrey Beene, who went directly to Trigère's office for a job upon returning from school in Paris in the late 1950s. Although he didn't get an interview, Beene doesn't hesitate to praise Trigère today: "It was out of admiration that I went to her." Trigère used only the best fabrics (originally importing them from France), insisted on details such as generous seams and perfectly placed darts, and cut her muslins freehand and on the bias using live models--skills virtually unknown in American fashion. But then Trigère was born in Paris, and raised by a tailor and a dressmaker. (Her family, Russian Jews, moved to New York in 1937 to escape the Nazi threat.)

Trigère's technique may have been elusive--an intuitive response to the movement of the fabric and the curves of her live models--but the results were rock solid. "Her clothes hang as though she has very carefully studied how fabric fits on the human body," says Valerie Steele, chief curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "She has a really great sense of the body's anatomy and how clothing can enhance that." Other designers often start with an inert paper sketch and end up with the slightest of designs. Trigère's garments were flatteringly tailored, fit fantastically, and--most important--they were practical. "I respected my fellow woman," she says. "The clothes I made were something that you could trust. They had a base and shoulders. They had meaning, so they stayed in the closets of women." Her craftsmanship and outlook on fashion were traditional, but she was also innovative. Among the things she introduced are the reversible coat, wool evening dresses, mobile collars, black dresses with sheer tops, and sleeveless and cape-collared coats.

Trigère's designs may have withstood the test of time, but her way of doing business didn't. Over the years, she sold largely to the same set of buyers and individuals. While other designers were licensing their names out to a growing number of product lines, Trigère continued to work the way she always had, draping and cutting the fabric for each new muslin herself. When the businesses she depended on (like Martha's, in New York, and I. Magnin, in California) closed, so did hers. "I was a very stupid girl," she says in retrospect. "I did not sell my name when I should have. I should have put my name on everything--on a brassiere, on glasses for sure. But you cannot regret the past, because you cannot help that." It was an error on the side of quality, which will be Trigère's legacy.

In addition to marketing perfume and accessories, Trigère is taking on new projects. Just three months ago she signed a deal with the start-up company Gold Violin to design canes and wheelchair accessories, though she has no need for them herself. "After I first talked to these people, I saw women at the theater with canes that I hated. I went back to them and said, eLet's make gold canes for the people in black tie,'" she says with a resonant laugh. "It's exciting for me to do something new. I think what's important is to stay interested in life--at any age, but at mine particularly."