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Adolfo Sardiña (February 15, 1933 in Cárdenas — November 27, 2021, Manhattan) was a Cuban-born American fashion designer who began his career as a milliner for Bergdorf Goodman in 1948, and apprenticed both at
Cristóbal Balenciaga and at
Coco Chanel during the 1950s. While chief designer for the wholesale milliners Emme, he won the Coty Award and the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award. In 1963, he set up his own salon in New York, firstly as a milliner, and then focusing on clothing. He retired from fashion design in 1993. Sardiña started in 1962 and eventually expanded his line to include women’s clothing, accessories, and perfume. The Adolfo II label was introduced in 1963, but continued to be produced into the 1980s.
Edward C. Perry, a financial adviser who was his companion of more than 40 years, died in 1994. Although he attracted a devoted following, Adolfo remained aloof. Many of his contemporaries mingled with their clients at private parties and basked in the limelight at publicized events, but he steadfastly refused to become a part of the social whirl. His one concession was a Christmas party at the “21” Club for employees and clients to whom he felt especially close.
Throughout Adolfo’s career, he dressed his well-heeled loyalists smartly, often favoring suits, precisely fitted dresses and gowns in striking solid shades. Despite having internationally known clients like Reagan, Babe Paley, C.Z. Guest, Nan Kempner,
the Duchess of Windsor and Pat Buckley, Adolfo was unimpressed by his fame. In 2014, he told WWD, “I can’t imagine that you would be interested in anything that I have to say.”
Adolfo Sardiña was born Feb. 15, 1923, in Havana. His father, Waldo, was a lawyer. His mother, Marina Gonzales, died in childbirth, and Adolfo was raised by an aunt, María López, a fashionable woman with a taste for Parisian couture. He studied at a Jesuit school in Havana, and when he was 16, his aunt began taking him to the fashion shows in Paris. There he met Coco Chanel several times but was too shy to talk to her. Still, her influence remained with him throughout his career, evident first in the Chanel-type jackets he designed and showed over silk dresses, and later in his Chanel-inspired knit suits.
After working in Paris as an apprentice to Cristobal Balenciaga, he moved to New York and began a career as an assistant milliner. At 17, he became an apprentice to Bragaard, a hat designer, and then went to Bergdorf Goodman as the millinery designer there. When he asked that his name be included on hat labels and was turned down, he left to join Emme, one of the best-known milliners of her day. (Halston succeeded him at Bergdorf’s.)
He was successful, winning a Coty Award in 1953, but he also began designing a few pieces of ready-to-wear for special clients, and he, like Halston, realized that the heyday of hats was over.
After studying dressmaking four nights a week with Ana Maria Borrero, a Cuban designer who had worked in Paris with
Paul Poiret and Jean Patou in the 1920s, Adolfo began making the dresses worn by his hat models.
Lady Gaga leaving her apartment in 2018 wearing an Adolfo II Hat.
Fellow designer Bill Blass had encouraged him to venture out on his own, so Adolfo followed that advice. With a $10,000 loan from Blass and $25,000 from other friends and clients, he started a rtw business in 1961. Creating Chanel-like suits that were knitted and very packable, along with jacket dresses, caftans and evening dresses with bow-tied necks, he was an almost immediate success and repaid Blass’ seed money six months later. The Duchess of Windsor Wallis Simpson, who was a close friend of his aunt’s and someone whom Sardinia first met in Havana, also helped to set him on his way.
The salon, at 22 East 56th Street, evolved into a dress business that was to become one of the most prestigious in the 1970s and ’80s.
He spoke of the duchess of liking her “immensely. Like everyone that you meet, you have your own opinion about how you feel about them them. I loved her. She was really the best.”
Simpson often frequented his little shop and asked if he would like to make dresses for her. “I said yes, of course. They were, of course, successful. She used to always say, ‘Now look here Adolfo’…then she introduced me to Mrs. Paley (Babe Paley, a perennial on best-dressed lists and wife of William Paley, founder of the modern CBS), who became one of my friends. And Mrs. Paley introduced me to Mrs. Betsy Bloomingdale
(wife of Alfred Bloomingdale, the department store scion and founder of what became the Diners Club).”
For Gloria Vanderbilt, he said, “I started to make her some capes and minidresses…to go with the hats she bought.”
Before long, his client list read like a socialite who’s who — Paley, Jackie Kennedy, Buckley, Annette Reed, Jane Engelhard, Guest, Kempner, Mica Ertegun, Barbara Hutton, Isabel Eberstadt, Evangeline Bruce, Lee Annenberg, Noreen Drexel, Bloomingdale, Ethel Scull, Louise Melhado, Buffy Cafritz, Robin Duke, Edna Morris and Barbara Walters. Guest was another Havana-made connection. The designer’s aunt and uncle hosted a luncheon for Guest and
Ernest Hemingway after they were married in Cuba.
The designer and Reagan became fast friends after meeting in 1966. Adolfo began dressing Reagan before she was in the White House, and she was shown on the cover of W in his clothes. She had several suits, he noted at the time, that she had bought from him seven years before her husband became president and she made them look new as she continued to wear them.
Reagan wore his designs to both of her husband presidential inaugurations in 1981 and 1985. The bright red dress, coat and hat that the first lady sported in 1981 was a particular favorite. It helped to establish that color as “Nancy Reagan Red.” Reagan once remarked that his clothes were made with such precision that they could be worn inside out.
Stan Herman described Sardinia as “the
Greta Garbo of our designers.” He said, “I don’t think many people understand how important he was as a designer. He was on a level with people like Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, and Pauline Trigere. They we’re definitely the designers to reach for for people like myself.”
Herman and Sardinia had worked together briefly, when they were both associated with Henri Bendel. Herman recalled being backstage at the Coty awards in 1969 with fellow winners Sardinia and Halston. “There he was dressing everyone in his tableau himself. There wasn’t a helper. I had to go over and help him, because I felt so sorry for him.” he said.
Sardinia’s do-it-yourself approach stemmed from a sense of privacy, Herman said. “He never became a part of the scene. I respected him. He never felt that he was a part of the upper crust. He was a worker.”
Unlike many of his ilk, Adolfo wasn’t a “walker” or a talker, guarding his
clients’ privacy. “I don’t like to gossip. I don’t think that’s necessary,” he
said in a 2014 interview.
Over time, Adolfo’s star was illuminated but that never sparked any self glory. The designer said he “just enjoyed” the strong-minded women who he worked for. “I never felt in my whole career that I was an important person. I have always felt that you are more important. I am not important. I never had a competition with the person whom I was with, because sincerely I wasn’t
important.”
The classic fashion faux pas — when two or more women show up at a party in the same dress — and the usual reaction is mortification wasn’t the case at an Adolfo show. Twice a year, his faithful clients gathered for his show at the St. Regis, and it often turned out that many of them had picked the same favorite suit or frock to wear. It was all part of the fun.
In addition to selling to the most prestigious stores, his twice-a-year fashion shows, usually held at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, became a not-to-be-missed event for his image-conscious customers. Every August and January, many of the faithful left their retreats in the Hamptons and on Cape Cod and their ski lodges in Vermont and Colorado to return to Manhattan for just one day to attend the shows.
“Almost every women at an Adolfo opening feels that the designer is a close friend,” fashion writer Bernadine Morris wrote in The New York Times in 1985. “This is one reason why the number of women wearing Adolfo clothes at his shows is higher than at any other designer’s opening. Another is that they trust him implicitly.”
The apogee of this may have been the presentation on July 14, 1983, to which
many of his acolytes wore the same leaf-detailed white cardigan and silk
dress.
As Jean Remmel put it, “I don’t mind. It’s a very good way to look.” Barbara Davis said, “I remember when I would show up at a party and Harriet Deutsch, Marian Jorgensen and myself were all wearing the same look. Instead of being embarrassed, we loved it.”
Once he flew into California to deliver a dress to Reagan for a big event. At the airport he somehow missed the chauffeur who had the outfit and ended up being badly delayed. “There was Mrs. Reagan all ready to get dressed,” he said. “She’d been waiting for three hours. I thought I was going to cry. I’m never late. But she was so nice, so understanding. Another woman would have been on the edge of hysterics. But she was perfectly collected, perfectly calm.
“Mrs. Reagan brought to me a popularity with women whom I don’t know and who might not even know me,” he noted. “My basic ideas for my clothes usually come from my clients. It’s based on the person that exists and that I know quite well. It’s all done in a very real way thinking about the customer.”
His clean-cut soigné black dresses, Reagan-ruffled silk blouses, subtle nautical knit suits and entrance-makers like a one-shouldered black velvet gown with a taffeta dinosaur sleeve won over a moneyed crowd. He knew what his ladies wanted and gave it to them with inspiration from overseas. In the early
1980s, Sardinia was described by a Saks Fifth Avenue executive as “the designer, who has captured the mood and times of America. This is his moment.”
In 1981, the designer’s ties to Reagan led to criticism of his company’s use of the contractor Ruth Fashions, which the New York State attorney general’s office claimed had violated industrial homework laws. Sardinia soldiered on quietly though for the majority of his expansive career. Hinting at his retirement in 1993, the designer told
a magazine, “Everyone has a time they stop.”
Despite the influence of his customers, in March 1993 he closed his rtw business to focus on his licensees and to help
his terminally ill longtime companion, Edward C. Perry. “We’re going to be hard-pressed to find a replacement for him,” then-vice chairman and chief executive officer of Saks Fifth Avenue Philip Miller said at the time.
With outposts in select Saks stores for his custom designs, Adolfo would travel semiannually to each location for special appearances. Shortly before his retirement, six of his trunk shows racked up $2 million in sales for the retailer.
And the designer’s customers were bereft. “You know when ladies say, ‘Oh, I just don’t know what I’m going to wear?’” asked Jean Tailer. “With Adolfo, you always have the right thing to wear.”
Adolfo was an avid reader who led a very quiet life, spending many post-career days in his Upper East Side art-adorned home and pitching in regularly at his parish St. Vincent Ferrer. “If I still lived in Cuba, I would probably live in the house where I was born. I like roots,” Sardinia once said. (PBS’ “Downton Abbey” was a favorite show of the designer’s later in life.)
Instead of recreating his boyhood house, he brought the style he grew up with to his residences, with English paintings of dogs, an 18th-century portrait, neoclassical busts, Empire-style furniture and Aubusson pillows. His Fifth Avenue apartment was adorned with Old Masters paintings and drawings and 19th- and early 20th-century furniture as well as Roman basalt portrait head of a woman circa 1st century A.D.
He thought of his salon, in mirrored crystal and gold, as a club and his clients as members, but he usually addressed them by their surnames. “I am not a pal,” he once explained.
Adolfo died in Manhattan on November 27, 2021. Private funeral services
were held at St. Vincent Ferrer Roman Catholic Church, followed by a burial at
Restland Memorial Park in East Hanover, N.J.
The designer was so private that he had requested that his funeral not have a
eulogy other than a few words be delivered by the priest, who says the mass,
according to Joann Palumbo, a spokesperson for Sardinia. His estate is not
expected to be settled for a few years, she said.
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