Jessica McClintock's Romantic Aesthetic Always In Fashion

Contemporary fashion designers and customers are clamoring for a look pioneered by Jessica McClintock

On September 14, 1998, readers of Women’s Wear Daily woke up to a surprise. Nestled among the rag-trade publication’s runway reviews, party dispatches, and job postings was a curious personals ad by the -American designer Jessica McClintock. "Hopeless romantic looking for the perfect match," the desperate-sounding headline teased. But on further reading, the “mature, romantic, ambitious” subject in search of a soul mate turned out not to be McClintock herself but her company, looking for a business partner to share in its fortunes.

McClintock,who came to prominence in the early 1970s as the empress of bridal-and-prom dressing behind the Gunne Sax label, immediately got a nibble from Kerry Glasser, a seasoned licensing and marketing pro and the founder of New York-based Concept Marketing Group, who was taken with the ad and the woman who had placed it. “I liked what she said and how she said it” Glasser recalls. “I contacted her and we instantly hit it off.”

Universally recognized as one of the most successful and visionary woman designers - we jump ahead to today.

On the fall runways, the flouncy, froufrou offerings at labels ranging from Stella McCartney to Erdem and even Vetements could be read as a collective valentine to Jessica’s romanticism.

“For ordinary middle-American women who weren’t card-carrying fashionistas, Jessica assimilated important trends and made them accessible,” says Valerie Steele, the noted fashion historian and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “The idea that there was a purer time in the past that was somehow a golden age is referenced whenever fashion is exploiting a hippie feeling. The kind of pretty, feminine stuff that Jessica popularized in the ’70s is absolutely having a revival now.”

Designer Erdem Moralioglu agrees. “More than ever, people crave things that feel individual and that have a human hand to them,” he says. “There’s a hankering for the specialness that is associated with those times and shares Jessica’s attraction to Hitchcockian clothes that can be at once lascivious and prim. “I love the idea of the seen and the unseen, like showing the nape of the neck on a high-front top or layering sheer fabrics in a way that both conceals and reveals.”

These days, McClintock, lives with her two Labradors in a spectacular mansion in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco that was previously owned by Francis Ford Coppola. She stays current with fashion shows on social media and says she wasn’t all that shocked to find herself part of the mix again: “With fashion being cyclical, I knew it was just a matter of time. Let’s just say I was pleasantly not surprised.”

McClintock, was her own fit model until she recently ceased manufacturing to focus exclusively on licensing her creative aesthetic and brand. Glasser is looking for Jessica to join forces with new business partners in the areas of prom, bridal, other apparel, and the extension of her successful home fashions program.

In addition to her signature motifs being all over the runways, and her vintage wares being sought out on eBay, McClintock has had an unlikely booster in Hillary Clinton, who was married, in 1975, in a white lace Gunne Sax dress; photographs of the ceremony have been suddenly as unavoidable as online pop-up ads. “I was surprised when I saw it again, because it was purchased in a department store, off the rack, and was a little understated for a bridal dress,” McClintock says. “But it definitely had an old-world glamour to it which I try whenever possible to keep as an aesthetic of my apparel, accessories and home-related designs.” The gown brought her luck early on - and might have again had she worn it on Election Day!