Geoffrey Beene 1927- 2004; A look back at the incredible talent of an American classic.

Byline: Hamish Bowles, Alber Elbaz

Geoffrey Beene presides over American fashion like the caretaker of some higher wisdom. He is the most original, idiosyncratic, autonomous creator in his field," wrote Joan Juliet Buck in Vogue in 1988 of the enigmatic perfectionist who died this September.

Beene discovered his calling when he was a pre-med student at Tulane. "Cadavers were the moment of truth," he once said, but if his revulsion caused him to flee the school and abandon the metier his family had chosen

for him, Beene "never yielded his anatomy-

student's zeal for the body," as Richard Martin and Harold Koda, curators of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, have observed. "The way Beene cuts through fabric is so precise and controlling, it's surgical," Koda told Vogue in 1994.

While still a student, Beene had experienced an epiphany when he saw the costumes that Hollywood's star couturier Adrian had created for Joan Crawford's 1946 vehicle Humoresque. Adrian's own antic, surrealist wit and unconventional assembling of geometric or kinetically shaped pattern pieces into dramatic garments would inform Beene's work throughout his career.

After fashion studies in New York and Paris, Beene apprenticed with a Parisian tailor before entering the relentlessly commercial world of Seventh Avenue. He established his own house in 1963, telling Women's Wear Daily the following year, "What I'm trying to do are clothes that look effortless without any degree of calculation on the part of the wearer-but plenty of calculation on my part." Two years later he said, "The more you learn about clothes, the more you realize what has to be left out." He soon established a reputation with designs that had the graphic quality of paper dolls. Beene would later dismiss these as "uptight little dresses," but the bolder innovations that blended his European training with an all-American aesthetic (the brightly sequined "football sweater" dresses of 1967, for instance) and his appropriation of humble men's suiting for glamorous women's clothes ("one of my greatest pleasures has been to take jersey and men's fabrics into the ballroom")-as well as his "indiscreet liaisons" of materials, such as gingham with satin and sable with corduroy-suggested the idiosyncratic brilliance to come.