Fashion is an instrument through which you show you belong to a group.
- John Weitz
John Weitz was a man for all seasons. Handsome, intelligent, and debonair. He was a novelist, historian, businessman, spy, and above all a renowned mens and ladies fashion designer. James Bond was fiction but he was the real deal.
Born in Berlin in 1923, Hans Werner Weitz was the son of a prosperous clothing manufacturer and German first world war hero, who had won the Iron Cross in the infantry. The family was living well when Christopher Isherwood visited. But they were Jewish, quick to understand what was about to happen, and, in the early 1930s, moved to London, where the young Weitz went to well known private school, St Paul's in London. At St Paul’s he said it was normal to be caned if he didn’t wear morning clothes to class, so he always did with lapels rolled properly. “On weekends we wore blazers…correctly…with the collar up and with a scarf and with brown suede shoes, which were very new then….but never, of course, after six,” he once reminisced.
He was an apt pupil and Oxbridge seemed to be a seamless next stage. However he lasted only a year studying at Oxford University.
Instead he headed off to Paris to begin an apprenticeship with the women's tailor, Captain Edward Molyneaux. In 1938, at the age of 18, Weitz was falsely arrested as an enemy agent while working in the London office of the Paris fashion house Molyneux.
His father was already in America and in 1939, and when France was overuun at the outbreak of the war, Weitz could see he had to get out of Europe. After a tortuous trip through Shanghai, China and later Yokohama, Japan to reach the USA.
In 1943 and now a naturalised American citizen and aged 21, John (as he was now dubbed) was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, operating in Germany until 1946. He was fluent in both French and German which came in handy in his work during the war in Europe.
He would only ever describe his work in Germany until 1946 as "sensitive," though, much later, his publisher John Fairchild told the New York Times that Weitz "loved all that romantic part of his past. He was a perfect gentleman." What is known about his OSS work was that he was part of a 1944 mission in support of the plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler formulated by German Wehrmacht officers, under the instigation of Claus von Stauffenberg. After the war, Weitz helped to liberate the Dachau concentration camp
Weitz was also a man with connections, as when he confirmed that a former OSS boss had shown him gangster blackmail photos of the longtime FBI director J Edgar Hoover with his boyfriend, Clyde Tolson. In the 1970s, Weitz's friend Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, producer of the James Bond movies, teased him about his resemblance to the character - adding that Weitz was better looking.
Weitz returned to New York in the 1940s, a young garment trader well placed to pick up on American women's new taste for informal sportswear, leather coats and men's shirts.
Weitz founded his women’s sportswear business, John Weitz Designs, in 1954, and launched men’s wear a decade later. For his women’s wear, he often tailored the best of men’s designs for the female figure, with looks such as shaped houndstooth checked coats, formal shirts with jet buttons and cuff links, and corduroy pants.
“Whatever happens in women’s pants comes from the men’s pants,” he said in 1965.
In the Sixties, Weitz began phasing out his women’s and children’s apparel business to concentrate on men’s wear. By 1977, Weitz had 18 licensees and $150 million worldwide retail sales of products bearing his label, including sunglasses, belts, umbrellas and even cigars. That year, he also reentered the licensed women’s apparel category, because, he said, he saw the need for an alternative to coordinated sportswear merchandising.
“I’m rather sick of seeing American working women treated as children with prepackaged clothes,” Weitz said at the time.
In 1964, he launched his menswear range, applying the technical standards of manufacture he had learned from his father. Unusually, in that era of obsolescence, he went for ease and wear - clothes, he said, should be worn "as if they are old and valued friends".
Of course he committed fashion faux pas here and there. This was the 1970s after all. But the previaling zeitgeist had to be understood before we laugh or wince at the designs today. None left a lasting impression quite as strong as the posthumously awarded ‘king of the ‘70s’—the leisure suit.
Once hailed by top designers John Weitz and Calvin Klein as a garment with staying power, the leisure suit was ostracized from the kingdom of en vogue before the 1970s ever came to an end. Just as it had swiftly risen to the top of fashion, it fell into the leagues of comic relief twice as fast. Today we laugh at the cheesy styles, feminine colors, and garish plaids. But what we seem to have forgotten is that the leisure suit did more than just provide us with years of laughs. The leisure suit helped men open themselves up to new ideas in clothing. It allowed them to experiment outside of the style box they’d been locked in for too many years. If the 1970s had passed without the leisure suit, “business casual” for men might never have developed as soon as it did. The leisure suit may have been a fashion catastrophe, but it laid the groundwork for men to strut their fashion stuff for decades to come.
He was his own dream model - "healthy and scrubbed," with a flat stomach - and toured stores showing off his new line of narrow, European-cut shirts, half the width of the standard American style. His navy suit, alphabet-patterned ties and aubergine socks are commonplace now, but were then part of a new, executive self-presentation, more about putting it together than design. By 1974, he had become a household name, with annual earnings of $18m and a Coty Award, fashion's prize for innovation.
Weitz skilfully let his name generate money by itself, using witty advertisements to maintain a high public profile. A poster on the back of New York buses announced, for example, "She ditched him, John Weitz ties and all".
He also used his writing abilities to promote the business image: his book Man In Charge, The Executive's Guide To Grooming, Manners And Travel (1974), became a bestseller, but was really just part of his trade in suavity and martinis. Even his headquarters was above Madison Avenue. There were also two well received novels, Friends In High Places and The Value Of Nothing.
Two other books, however, marked out Weitz as a historian of the Nazi period. He wrote Hitler's Diplomat, a biography of the third reich foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Hitler's Banker, about the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.
He was repeatedly asked about reconciling the sale of navy blazers and researching von Ribbentrop, but he saw no clash: "Who else but a fashion designer would understand such a worldly man?" Weitz certainly comprehended the Nazis genius for the projection of personal image, and, though never a major historian, established a sufficiently solid reputation as a researcher that the president of Germany consulted him on the subject.
Meanwhile, he lived the life of his executive book, raced cars at Sebring in the 1950s, and belonged to the New York Yacht Club and the Vintage Sports Car Club. In his Park Avenue apartment, a Chinese chef cooked dinner parties for his friends - among them the novelist Tom Wolfe- and film people.
In 1964, he married the actor Susan Kohner, and their two sons, Christopher and Paul, remembered Ingmar Bergman taking them to the circus, and film directors John Huston and Billy Wilder dropping in for coffee -"just nice old men around the house every once in a while". The boys' chief complaint about their father was that he made them wear blue blazers. Both Chris and Paul would go on to forge their own Hollywood careers as the producers and directors of such movies as American Pie (1999) and About a Boy (2002).
John Weitz had a deep fondness for cats which raised eyebrows amongst his more masculine following. But Weitz was unrepentent. Weitz adored their elegance, and was quoted on them more often than on the Nazis. "Even overweight cats instinctively know the rule: when fat, arrange yourself in slim poses," he wrote.
John Weitz died on 3 October 2002 at the grand old age of 79. He remained a dashing figure and aged well - like the American version of Gianni Agnelli. He had throughout his life the air of adventure, even danger. He was stylish fashion designer who lived up to the executive image of his clothes. It’s no wonder no one balked when he made a name for himself with the nowadays unthinkable ad slogan, “John Weitz designs for the woman who wishes her husband could afford her.” His was a life well lived.
