Out Of Vogue

High heels are back in style and Ann Pearle couldn’t be happier. The petite 81-year-old fashion artist, who was at the top of her career in Dallas’ heyday as a fashion center, is pleased to see that clothing designers are bringing back femininity and color to women’s apparel.

“Isn’t it nice to go out and everyone isn’t wearing black?” she asked. “We used to look around and think, ‘Who died?’ ”

Since her first job as a basement artist for Fort Worth’s Monnigs in the late 1940s, Pearle has seen it all in the fashion industry, from wartime austerity styles, to glamour and full skirts, to pill box hats and three-quarter-length sleeves, to shifts and miniskirts, to hot pants, boots and pantsuits.

“Fashion is so expressive of what’s going on in the world,” she said. “I had a ball doing this work.”

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Pearle remembers Dallas as a top fashion destination. In 1959, Kim Dawson, whose husband was a fashion photographer, opened a modeling agency, which became the largest talent and modeling agency in the Southwest.

A few years earlier, real estate developer Trammell Crow founded the Dallas Market Center, and Raymond D. Nasher opened North Park Center in 1965, the city’s first upscale shopping mall.

“Everybody who worked in the fashion industry wanted to work here,” she said. “There was a lot of manufacturing going on. Dallas women were well known all over the country for their taste in clothes, even though it was a little flashy.”

This reputation for style prompted many specialty stores to open and cater to the ladies who would pay high dollar for big-name designers. Small shop owners became celebrities in Dallas’ fashion scene, names like Lou Lattimore, Marie Leavell and Lester Melnick. Pearle had known Melnick from their days at Neiman Marcus when she was the art director and he was a buyer. Their experiences working with Stanley Marcus, or “Mr. Stanley” as he was affectionately known, taught them a philosophy about fashion and business that made them both successful on their own in the competitive industry.

When Pearle began working for Marcus, he asked, “What is your general philosophy of the newspapers, Ann?” A nervous Pearle replied, “Well, I guess it’s to sell things.” “No,” Marcus said. “It’s to sell ideas.” She soon began to understand that it was what people thought of the advertising that brought them into the store. And Melnick saw it, too. When he opened his own shop years later, he incorporated everything he had learned from Marcus into his business.

Pearle left Marcus after five years to start a family with her new husband, Lester, whom she had married in 1955. “It seemed like the next creative thing to do at the time,” she said, laughing.

After son Eric’s birth in 1957, Pearle’s husband was transferred to New York. Then another son, Michael, came along in 1960 and the four of them moved back to Dallas. That’s when Melnick discovered that Pearle was back in Texas, and that she was freelancing as a commercial artist.

“Her talents exceeded what my store required,” said Melnick, who closed his clothing business and retired 18 months ago. “She was a fountainhead of ideas.”

Melnick recalled that many of his clientele would look for his ads before the funny papers, and some would pop their heads into his door in Preston/Royal Shopping Center just to say, “Boy, that was great!” Then off they’d go.

Pearle liked the freedom that Melnick gave her to create her art, but she also recalled the restrictions and immediacy of the day, when dress lines would come in and she’d have to draw them for the next day’s newspaper.

“She’d give us three or four layouts,” said Melnick. “We’d pick one. She put in the trash enough designs for three more businesses.”

But all the time that Pearle was drawing advertisements for Melnick, she was also freelancing at home for other clients, too. “Mostly I’d work from nine to eleven, or midnight,” said Pearle, who divorced in 1968. “After the kids were in bed.”

She designed greeting cards and calendars for the now defunct stationery company, the Drawing Board. D Magazine bought one of her covers. So did Sakowitz, a leading Dallas retailer. She loved what she was doing to make a living, but painting with watercolors was something she had wanted to pursue on a larger scale since she was a little girl in China.

“I always knew I wanted to paint as well, but who had time?” said Pearle. “So when the kids went to college, I bought a home in Richardson and converted the garage into a studio.”

Her watercolor paintings are large, and she explained it simply. “One reason I paint so big is because I did this …” (she pointed to a quarter-page advertisement of a beautiful woman drawn in detail with black ink). She also explores sculpture, printmaking and assemblage as expressions of her art.

Bob Nunn, NLC’s Gallery director, commissioned her show for a number of reasons. He liked the large size of her paintings for one, her traditional but also experimentally realistic watercolors, and also her abstract images.

“It’s really good for the student to see these approaches in a given media,” he said.

Pearle loves the freedom of watercolors and it shows in her work.

“Oil is too slow for me, but watercolors—they are full of surprises.”