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's 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.
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' active duty with the Coast Guard. He graduated from New York University with a master's degree in retailing in 1963.
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 a 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 sketch artist, 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 Big Look or Soft Look that was the leading high-fashion trend of the mid-seventies, 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. He had been one of the first mainstream designers to revive miniskirts in 1978. Also in 1979, he began introducing other means to widen the shoulder besides padding, mainly via adding fullness at the top of the sleeves with gathers and folds. He played with silhouettes by showing knee-length and shorter circle skirts and calf-length culottes (a word he disliked, preferring "cropped pants") with unusually-proportioned tops, while still staying true to the fresh, natural look of earth-toned textiles that he had refined during the Soft Look period. His cropped pants, cropped sweaters, and dimpled sleeves of the end of the seventies were very influential.
As the company's chairman and head designer he later developed Perry Ellis Menswear Collection – marked by "non-traditional, modern classics." 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. He was one of 15 designers asked by US Vogue in 1980 which designer they most admired. Many participants chose Balenciaga and Chanel, but Ellis selected Kenzo as his favorite, citing Kenzo's independence and uniqueness.
In 1980, Ellis explored handmade knitwear, enlarged patterns, and enlarged Argyle and launched his first male collection. He added petticoats and side width to the full, hip-yoked miniskirts he had introduced the previous year. As an additional alternative to the prominent shoulder-padding he had become known for in 1978, he used capelet collars to add width and continued to incorporate top-of-sleeve tucks and pleats. For spring of 1981, he presented soft corsets and hip-padded versions of the short skirts he had begun showing in 1979, and he began using a few more substantial fabrics for shaping. This former leader of the mid-seventies Big Look joined Fall 1981's brief return to that style with relish, showing longer lengths, loose layers, and harem pants with Cossack-inspired hats and capes, though the look this time was more structured, via cummerbunds, extended shoulders, and tulle petticoats.
In 1982, Perry Ellis won the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Designer of the Year award, at a time when his company had more than 75 staff. He released his "Chariots of Fire" collection for spring of that year, continuing to show the longer lengths he had favored the previous fall, though never exclusively. For his fall 1982 collection, he tried his hand at some of the highly tailored suit styles that had dominated fashion since 1978, to a cooler-than-usual critical reception. In 1983, he showed high-waisted fit-and-flare skirts and slim trousers with short jackets.
He reduced the rise of the previous year's high waistband somewhat for Spring of 1984, when he presented a collection intended to suggest an idyllic Australia, replete with his well-loved cropped trousers, cropped jackets, and focus on long skirts. In 1984, Perry Ellis America was created in cooperation with Levi Strauss and he revived his lesser-priced Portfolio product line, filling it with the kind of soft, unlined, comfortable clothes he had shown in the mid-seventies, now updated with broader shoulders. His Fall 1984 collection for both men and women was an homage to artist Sonia Delaunay and focused on Ellis's trademark sweaters in Delaunay colors. Prints and slimmer, more minimal shapes were a focus for his Spring 1985 collection, with large florals, revealing cuts, and tunic sweaters prominent. These closer-to-the-body cuts would continue through the end of the year, enlivened by prints and colors inspired by Chinese porcelains.
In the early 1980s, wholesale revenues had figured at about $60 million. By 1986 that number had risen to about $260 million.
Highly praised professionally and personally, Ellis believed that "fashion dies when you take it too seriously." Of Perry Ellis's fashion design, Michael Bastian remarked that "no one did it better...He was able to be modern and yet not come off antiseptic." New York Times fashion columnist Bernadine Morris praised Ellis's tweeds and sweaters as "comfortable and forever-looking," with the "insouciant feeling of a college woman slipping into her boyfriend's jacket that is a size or so too big for her, or putting together a jacket and a pair of pants in patterns that don't quite match, but look quite appealing," while Steven Kolb, CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, described Ellis' fashion as "my way to step forward in fashion, but to still have a comfort level. It helped define my personality."