Rose Marie (Yancy) Reid

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In 1946, Rose Marie and Jack were divorced. By the following year, she was intent on transferring the business to the United States. In search of an American business partner, she approached Jack Kessler, a clothing salesman, and his wife Nina Kessler, in Seattle, Washington. In both Canada and the U.S., however, World War II had been over less than two years; the manufacturing sectors were retooling for peacetime and beset by shortages. With both machinery and materials of the kind Reid needed in short supply, Kessler followed the advice of his financial advisor, who assumed it would be impossible for Reid to succeed, by setting standards for their equal financial partnership that required the designer to acquire all the sewing machines, fabric, and employees to set up the company.

Reid put in an order with the Singer company for the sewing machines she needed. With her name on a waiting list, she turned up at the Singer factory in Winnipeg and announced that she was there to pick up her purchase. When the distributor was not encouraging, Reid replied that she knew the machines were there and she would wait. Within hours, an order of machines arrived at the factory—the exact number to fill Reid’s order, returned by a company that had been forced to close. Because she was there, the distributor agreed to turn them over to her. Said Nina Kessler: “[Reid] was the most organized, unorganized person I knew … and she was absolutely fearless…. She did what had to be done immediately no matter what anybody thought.” Anticipating how the suits would be received, Nina prophesied, “We won’t be able to make them fast enough.”

The first American manufacturing plant was set up in downtown Los Angeles (the leisurewear capital of the country), 30 miles from the airport, giving access to easy shipping. On an early buying trip to New York, Reid was in the office of a fabric company executive when she noticed a roll of gold metal thread on his desk. Asking for a piece, she took it back to her hotel room, where she tested it by dipping it in salt water. When she saw that it did not tarnish, she bought 20 yards of the thread in silver and 20 yards in gold, located a weaver and swore him to secrecy. Days later, the thread had been turned into shiny metallic gold and silver fabric, the first of its kind, and Reid set off with the yardage for Los Angeles to begin fitting it onto a model for her new swimsuit line. On September 20, 1946, before 300 national buyers and the press in Los Angeles, Rose Marie Reid, Inc., of California, made its company debut with three showings. At the finale of each show, the metallic gold suit was unveiled, at the unheard-of price of $90.

The show was a sensation. Buyers flocked to the company with their orders for the gold suit—so many that the limits of available cloth forced Reid to turn down three out of four. Trade magazines focused on the gold suit; it was featured by Apparel Week and newspapers throughout the country. Overnight, the Rose Marie Reid brand was famous. The company had opened in the U.S. hoping to achieve sales of more than $500,000 in its first year; thanks to the metallic gold suit, that goal was far exceeded. Manufacturers were soon copying Reid’s suits, said one of her major rivals, and those who didn’t “went out of business.”

Reid bought an estate in the suburb of Brentwood complete with swimming pool, riding stables and garden. She brought the children down from Vancouver, along with Marie and her Aunt Florence, and treated some of her new neighbors to personally designed and fitted swimsuits. She also welcomed use of the house by clubs and civic groups, and for fund-raising events, wedding receptions and activities of the Mormon Church. One day, when Reid was having lunch in the Brentwood village with her accountant, they overheard town officials discussing their lack of funds for repaving the village’s roads. Reid promptly volunteered to donate the money. She was dubbed the “village financial angel” by the local newspaper and made honorary mayor. Popular as a speaker, Reid also addressed civic and service clubs, as well as university business schools. She spoke about leadership, the future of women in business, and the necessity of hard work for business success; she herself had been following an exhausting schedule for years.

According to Reid, “nothing is so brutally frank as the bare essentials of a bathing suit.” She concentrated on construction and fit, and her early “skintite” suit, with its inch of fabric around the back and up over the shoulder that snapped into place, was revolutionary in holding the suit snugly through any activity on the beach. “Imagineering” was the name she gave to her shaping of suits to accommodate women of all ages and figures. Dividing the female torso into six areas, she created camouflaging devices to minimize imperfections in each, including a “bodice bra,” vertical stripes, tummy-control panels, brief skirts and shirrings.

In her designs, Reid continued to experiment, bringing bengaline, satin brocade and velvets into the swimwear field. She used a new synthetic material, plastylon, which combined the characteristics of plastic and nylon for a tidy fit. She employed fashionable and innovative braids and appliqués as trim. One famous style involved a red lobster on a white suit; another had a fish decorated with small sparkling mirrors; and Carole’s totem poles were a big hit in Canada. Special fabrics were used such as whites with thin gold metallic stripes, white-and-gold diamond-patterned mattelasse, and stripes of silver and candy pink that suggested a ball gown. She employed a fabric patented as Zelan, a colorfast and lightweight cotton or satin that was body-fitting, unstretchable, and cut to hold its shape. In 1951, Esquire featured a Rose Marie Reid design that employed 24-carat gold plating on black-lace fabric, sold exclusively at Lord & Taylor in New York City as the “suit of the year.” Life’s choice that year as the most outstanding and revolutionary suit was the “Hourglass,” with its squeezed-in waist and accented hips made more alluring in a satin-latex fabric. When Lord & Taylor featured Rose Marie Reid suits as “Jewels of the Sea” in its Fifth Avenue windows, its competitor, Saks Fifth Avenue, called the company to order “1,000 of whatever you have and 500 more for Palm Beach” to be sent “at once.” By 1952, two plants, one in Montreal and one in Los Angeles, were turning out 1,000 Rose Marie Reid suits a day, and sales had soared to $5 million.

As late as January 1949, the fashion editor of the Vancouver Daily Province still referred to Reid as “Vancouver’s famous swimsuit maker.” For several years, after purchasing her former husband’s portion of the company, Reid ran the U.S. and Canadian operations concurrently. As she coped with the company’s growing pains in California, however, it eventually proved too much to carry on the designing responsibilities for the Canadian branch as well. On October 20, 1952, the Canadian firm announced the closing of its doors, while Reid’s fashions in the U.S. proceeded apace.

The spinoff of the “Hourglass” was the “doubloon” shape, featuring colorfast elasticized taffeta and bengaline. In 1954, Reid created “bloomer bottoms,” a suit featuring delicate embroidery that accented the bustline; a widening of the suit just under the arms created an optical illusion, narrowing the waist, while pockets widened the hips. Maintaining her belief in the shaping of her suits to enhance a woman’s body as the means to business mastery, she continued to design for “modesty and a little mystery.” Throughout the 1950s, she essentially held off the invasion of the European bikini—with its minimum of material and no figure control at all—into the American market. In the late 1950s, her designs triggered another leap in sales with the introduction of bathing-suit knits. Reid was the leader in her field for almost two full decades.

In 1955, Reid was named one the top ten women in America by the Los Angeles Times. In June 1958, in featuring the Rose Marie Reid look, the Dallas Times-Herald suggested that it had become a catalyst in expanding the role of a woman’s swimwear, so that “instead of a single suit, she has a wardrobe, and each suit is part of a costume.” The previous month, on May 28, 1958, Reid had been co-winner, along with designer Bonnie Cashin , of the Sportswear Design Award sponsored by Sports Illustrated for “Sporting Look of the Year.”

In the 1950s, the Rose Marie Reid factory in Los Angeles produced 5,000 bathing suits a day, with overtime on occasion doubling that number to meet orders during peak season. After Reid began adding small collections of new swimsuit styles in late summer and at Christmas time, when stores formerly had been sold out of swimwear, the practice became industrywide. Meeting the demands of marketing her suits in 45 countries, Reid continued to refuse to design bikinis, offended by their skimpiness on grounds of both modesty and aesthetics. As the pressure intensified for her to adapt her to these styles, she reassessed her position, and decided instead to get out of the swimwear business. She had received all the recognition her field could bring and was now an extremely rich woman. In 1960, Reid retired from the swimsuit industry and turned to the design and manufacture of synthetic wigs, with a new corporation called the Reid-Meredith Company. Her swimsuit company, unable to maintain its competitive edge, closed its plant within two years. In 1964, she sold the right to the trademark name of Rose Marie Reid to the Jonathan Logan Company, and it is still associated internationally with swimwear.

As a pacesetter in the world of fashion, Reid believed youth gave her credibility, and she worked to maintain an energetic appearance. She also hated for anyone to know her true age. She once wrote to her sister Marion Heilner to say that if Marion did not also start fibbing about her age, Rose Marie was going to become her younger rather than her older sister. Refusing to admit she was older than 32, she smudged her birth date on her driver’s license and passport. On December 19, 1978, Reid died at the home of her daughter in Provo, Utah. A hybrid rose, dawn-pink in color, was named for Rose Marie Reid. There is no birth date on her gravestone.

Sources:

Alden, Sharon Reid. Two interviews by William G. Hartley, Provo, Utah, 1973 (typescript, Oral History Program Archives, Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah).

Burr, Carol Reid, and Roger Petersen. Rose Marie Reid: An Extraordinary Life Story. American Fork, UT: Covenant, 1995.

“Introducing Workers to Product,” in Business Week. November 20, 1954.

Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. Dictionary of American Biography. Scribner, 1995.

Lencck, Lena, and Gideon Bosker. Making Waves, 1989.

Lothrop, Gloria Ricci. “A Trio of Mermaids—Their Impact upon the Southern California Sportswear Industry,” in Journal of the West. January 1966.

Obituaries in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both December 22, 1978) and Deseret News (December 21, 1978).

Reid, Rose Marie. Interview by William G. Hartley, Provo, Utah, 1973 (typescript, Oral History Program Archives, Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah).

Sports Illustrated. June 9, 1958.

“Styling Buoys Swim Suit Maker,” in The New York Times. October 8, 1960.

“Swimsuits Around the Calendar,” in Fortune. February 1956.

“Well Suited by the West,” in Sports Illustrated. November 28, 1955.

Harriet Horne Arrington, freelance biographer, Salt Lake City, Utah

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia

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From Lois Hill Titus