By Kathleen Nicholson Webber
Larry Nipon thinks Philadelphia was a behind-the-scenes city when it came to fashion, at least as it related to his parent’s garment business, the Albert Nipon company had its design and production offices at 640 North Broad Street and Broad and Wallace for years and was one of the biggest employers in the garment industry in the city.
His father, the chairman of the Albert Nipon design house, died last week at the Residences at the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia of natural causes. He was 95. His mother, Pearl, the designer for the label, died in 2018. Together the two built a ready-to-wear empire that was one of the biggest in the U.S. selling to 1,000 high-end stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. Sales of Nipon’s dresses in the mid 80s reached $60 million.
They were favorites of first ladies, socialites here and in New York and celebrities like Barbra Streisand. Mary Tyler Moore, and Barbara Walters.
The Albert Nipon business had a very significant presence in the Philadelphia social and business scene but its public persona came out in New York said Larry. “That’s where the juice was, where the black ties were held, where the shows were. It was called Fashion Avenue for a reason.”
The company first started in maternity wear with a company called Ma Mere in 1955. “It was Saks Fifth Avenue that saw this phenomenon of the woman coming back to the workforce and she was dressing in pant suits which was perceived to be, I guess the appropriate style for the time which is basically male dressing,” Larry says. His mother thought maternity dressing was an oxymoron except
for Ma Mere. “Pearl created a product of maternity dresses during the Baby Boom era that became the most successful and significant maternity apparel company in the world.” Albert, born and raised in Philadelphia, got an accounting degree from Temple University in 1951 and left his accounting job at The Dupont company to run Ma Mere. The pair opened 100 Ma Mere stores. Barbra Streisand wore a Ma Mére maternity dress on the cover of Ladies Home Journal in August, 1966.
Streisand was working in London on the production of Funny Girl during the time of the shoot.
Then in 1968 the tent dress, the pill and women’s lib came onto the scene. “It was a perfect storm and not very good for the maternity business,” Larry says. Still Saks Fifth Avenue felt Pearl’s designs would translate well into women’s wear so Pearl did a small 12-piece line for them. A typical run at the time would be 200 to 300 dresses. Forty five, fifty thousand dresses later and Saks said they
thought they had a business. Saks wanted a designer name for the label. “Pearl said, well women don’t carry designer name labels so let’s make it Albert Nipon and that’s how the brand was created,” explains Larry. “So, Albert was the business and Pearl was the creative genius and they made a very, very good pair. We became a true designer brand.” The year was 1972. The fashion at the time was pantsuits and mannish looks so the when she wanted to design dresses the market held their breath. The designs featured high-end fabrics and signature details like pleating, smocking, bows, ruffles, flounces and interesting collars & cuffs.
In the company’s heyday, they started advertising and shot a campaign in and around Philadelphia called “And The Nipons Were There” and put the brand on the map. “It was probably one of the most recognized fashion campaigns,” says Larry and it featured things that happened in and around the city. In 1974 Albert and Pearl joined models in the dresses and the championship Philadelphia Flyers on the ice for one double-page spread. “We were using six, eight, ten of the world’s best known runway and photography models like Kim Alexis, Iman, and Beverly Johnson.” They did another shoot in the entire Phillies team in their locker room and another with the 76ers on the court and one on the Delaware River with the ship going down the river. “There was a lot of Philadelphia in those ads. My parents never lost their love, respect for the city and always wanted to give back to it.”
In the Philadelphia offices, the line was designed, the samples were made and about 30 % of the garments were manufactured there. Once the sales volumes got bigger, they had to move to other areas of the US and overseas to Hong Kong, Korea and the Philipines. Larry says the company’s greatest years were 1979-1987 before dresses fell out of favor. The dresses were priced from $100 to
2,000. “Pearl made white collars and cuffs cool. The quality of the treatments—pleating, faggoting, and lace inserts. They were things people just couldn’t copy.”
Larry felt the real success of the brand was predicated on what Pearl called the boardroom to the bedroom, dress mentality. “What Pearl introduced was the fact that it’s okay to be feminine, it’s okay to be sexy, it’s okay to be all these things that society wants women to be, but women didn’t necessarily believe the society wanted them to be that in business.” The designer disagreed with that notion. “She said ‘that’s bullshit’. Because I’m going to be sexy, and I’m going to be flirtatious, and I’m going to be provocative, and I’m going to be forceful, and I’m going to be demanding, and I’m going to be really good business person that just happens to be a woman.”
When companies started making money trying to knock off their designs, Albert decided to make a less expensive diffusion line called Nipon Boutique and later Albert Nipon Executive dress. The company then got into licensing for everything from suits to tabletop, fragrance and luggage. As sportswear started to become more important in department stores, they created Albert Nipon Collectibles, designer sportswear. But retailers weren’t sure where to put the line or how to
merchandise it. “It never got traction. It was a weird time in fashion. No one told us that somebody was going to turn off the light switch for about 18 years on dresses. Dresses stopped selling after the 80s and early 90s when sportswear and separates were what women were wearing,” When the company wanted to become more profitable, they called in an accounting firm who looked at all of their businesses and advised them to close their sportswear division, a decision Larry says was one of their worst. The other was selling to Leslie Fay in 1988. “That was the beginning of the end for the company,” he adds and shortly after he left fashion all together.
In 1984, Albert, at age 57, was sent to prison for personal and business tax evasion and spent 20 months in prison. During the time the company lost $15 million in revenues and never bounced back. Albert returned to the business in 1987 to try and recover losses but the company filed Chapter 11 in 1988, the same year It was sold to the Leslie Fay.
When sales were strong, immigrant craftspeople and new college grads found that jobs were plentiful at Albert Nipon was one of the most significant apparel employers in the city. They occupied two floors of nine in 640 Broad Street for design and production. The other floors were filled with other garment manufacturers. At the creative helm there was Pearl. “She was a force and
if you were able to follow her around you would learn more about the birth of a design and the journey from idea to an item in someone’s coset . There wasn’t a better shop where you could learn in. She had a team of unbelievably talented designers and people that were with the company 15 to 20 years. People didn’t leave Albert Nipon and that was a testament to my parents as employers. It wasn’t all fun. There were tears and fights but out of all the chaos came a really wonderful creative product.“
One such pupil was Gail Onorato who was a Drexel co-op student when she came to work for the Nipons and stayed for four years, from 1974-78. She went on to work for other top brands in Philadelphia like JG Hook and Jones New York where she became president of Special Markets and then to Ralph Lauren where she was president and chief merchandising officer. “I learned everything I knew about sewing in that factory, because they made a fabulous garment. So, I was started in the production lines, became a sample maker and then when I got good enough, they moved me in to work for the designers. I got to know Pearl pretty well.” She recalls the women who came to the offices to get the latest designs for the events of the season fresh off the factory floor. “Pearl was such a socialite herself. I could remember anyone who was anyone in Philadelphia coming in the back door with Pearl and going into the factory and picking up the dresses they love. Whatever the event was in Philadelphia, she’d come in the back way and say so and so’s looking for the peach one and sometimes we would have a brand-new style and it would go to some Main line important person. I was too young to know who all these people were. You know, she dressed the elite of Philadelphia in her dresses, in full length evening. Whatever that event was sure enough they were in a Nipon.”
The company held their fashion shows in their 530 Seventh Avenue showroom where sales was located and Larry and Albert split their time between New York and Philadelphia but there was never talk of moving to New York. “Philadelphia is where they grew up, where I grew up with my siblings and they had a love for West Philadelphia and Overbrook and their friends there.” Pearl and Albert raised four children in Philadelphia: Laurence “Larry”, Leon, and Andrew, and Barbara Joy,
known as “B.J.” Larry went on to work in fashion tech and Andrew worked for his parents before moving to Donna Karan where he ran licensing for them for 18 years.
