Marin's Fashion Icon

Gladys Perint Palmer-a woman of many talents

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For more than two decades, illustrator and writer Gladys Perint Palmer has been gently (and sometimes not so gently) skewering the loopy denizens of the international fashion world with her expressive and revealing caricatures. Exaggerating a muscle-bound John Galliano in a white wifebeater, for instance, or sketching a fashion editor dozing in the front row of a runway show with her legs apart and wearing no underwear, Palmer has often brought a much-needed irreverent eye to the rarefied demimonde in which her subjects dwell.

While her pricking of fashion’s hot-air balloon is often winsome and mostly amusing, not everyone has been happy. Surely not that knickerless editor whose sketch garnered this Palmer caption: “Hazards of the front row. Cross your legs, editors, and wake up!” Certainly not movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who hated Palmer’s rendering of him as a rumpled, overweight man in an ill-fitting suit.

Mostly, though, fashion’s glitterati have been able to live with Palmer’s spontaneous renderings, which have appeared in publications from the New Yorker to Vogue. Her sketches, signed with a large GPP, were included in last year's 100 Years of Fashion Illustration, and The Fashion Book, published in 1998, included her as one of 500 people of influence in fashion since 1860. Palmer’s work is also compiled in the 2003 Assouline book Fashion People.

“Gladys really captures the magic and mystery of fashion,” says Robin Givhan, Pulitzer Prize–winning fashion editor of the Washington Post. “You look at those illustrations and you’re not seeing a fashion reality; you’re seeing her fanciful interpretation of it.”

Dame Vivienne Westwood, the English designer credited with starting the punk movement, has known Palmer for many years. “A fashion sketch can say more than a hundred photos and as much as one great photo,” she says.

For the past 13 years, Palmer, who lives in San Rafael and travels to Paris four times a year for the ready-to-wear and couture shows, has also been establishing a fashion design program at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University (AAU). As executive director of the School of Fashion, she reigns over a passel of instructors, most of them working professionals.

Bringing both her academic training and her fashion industry connections to the table—she studied at the prestigious Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at Parsons the New School for Design in New York—Palmer has instituted a rigorous design program and attracted big names. Paris designer Azzedine Alaïa was guest of honor at the 2005 graduation fashion show and selected an intern from the school. Westwood received an honorary doctorate in 2007. Oscar de la Renta, Givhan, Suzy Menkes (acclaimed fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune) and the Yves Saint-Laurent muse Loulou de la Falaise have all visited. In May 2006, Palmer and the British textile designer Simon Ungless—a fellow Saint Martins grad and the school’s director of graduate fashion—persuaded fashion king Alexander McQueen to fly in from Europe to receive an honorary doctorate and award internships to three overjoyed students. This coup landed AAU on the pages of industry bible Women’s Wear Daily.

British designer Zandra Rhodes, known for zany clothes in clashing colors and prints, took two AAU students as interns at her American headquarters near San Diego. “I knew that of all the colleges you can get someone from who is right for you, it would be AAU, because Gladys and I have both been trained in the old school,” Rhodes says. “At AAU, it’s not about the quick computer garbage. If you go to some basic colleges around the country, they lift some kind of hokey drawing of a figure and have the students draw on top of it, and basically they learn to copy. Under Gladys they learn to draw.”

Though none of Palmer’s students have become breakout successes—no latter-day Marc Jacobs or Tom Ford has emerged as of yet—she’s proud of AAU’s worldwide success placing students in jobs and internships at companies ranging from Banana Republic to Louis Vuitton to Martin Margiela. Graduates hold design positions at Ralph Lauren, Burberry Prosum, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Zac Posen.

It’s no small achievement to entice the potential style-makers of tomorrow to study in a city not exactly considered a fashion mecca. Furthermore, AAU is the only school to have its graduate collections premiere on the runways during the Mercedes-Benz–sponsored spring and fall fashion weeks in New York City’s Bryant Park—the brass ring for any young designer. Not even Saint Martins or Parsons can claim that particular feat.

After showing her collection in New York in the spring of 2007, AAU alum Lene Andersen landed a job at Donna Karan, where she works as a sweater designer. “I have always admired Donna Karan, and being able to work in the Collection (division) is a great opportunity,” she says.

Karan says AAU prepares its students for the world of real fashion. “AAU makes sure its students have the talent as well as the required skills as designers,” she says. “But it also teaches them about how clothes have to function and ultimately fit into a woman’s lifestyle.”

To build up AAU’s enrollment from 250 students to the current 1,500, Palmer took a cue from her Saint Martins mentor, Muriel Pemberton. “She always said to hire the best teachers and let them get on with it,” Palmer says in her razor-sharp English accent.

There has been some criticism from those who say a university with no entrance requirements other than a high school diploma can’t be worth attending—an idea Palmer energetically pooh-poohs. Some 12 percent of AAU students are international, many of them not at all proficient in English.

“Maybe it’s easy to get in, but it’s not so easy to get out,” Palmer says, with more than a hint of irony. “The people who graduate and get into the final fashion show are so good they get jobs all over the world. While it is open enrollment at the beginning, it’s very competitive at the end.”

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