Once Upon a Time

Who was Wilson Folmar, and why have I spent nearly two years putting his story together? 

1. He was a fashion designer in New York during my favorite decades of fashion.

2. He designed at the top of his field, right from the start. 

3. I had access to his clothes as a teenager, borrowed from my stylish grandmother's closet. 

4. He was my great-uncle. 

Wilson Folmar's design label closed in 1972, and he passed away in 1975. Every so often a vintage fashion influencer will find a cool outfit with his name on the tag, but there is not much biographical information about him on the internet. Thanks to the digitization of newspapers and trade magazines and some lovingly kept family scrapbooks, however, I have been able to piece together a timeline that reads like a fairy tale come true, and I've been able to add letters, photos, clippings, and interviews with people who remember him. 

Wilson Bibb Folmar was born in Troy, Alabama in 1911. Just as the Great Depression wiped out his prominent family's banking and insurance businesses in Alabama, he was sketching his way to a career as a 7th Avenue dress designer. 

My grandparents and mother would tell me stories about Wilson, or "Ibby" as they called him, and I took my grandmother's offhand comments like "the Duchess of Windsor wore that dress in white" as sweet family lore. 

My grandmother's closet was full of 1980's first lady suits, track suits, and day dresses, and then...1960's treasures. And I, lucky girl, was allowed to wear these cocktail dresses to dances and parties. While Laura Ashley and chintz, dropped waist dresses had their way with my classmates' closets, I was usually in a sleek black crepe shift with a carwash skirt, or a one-sleeved chiffon mini dress, or a vivid floor-length tunic with covered buttons at the neck. It was the nineties in Montgomery, Alabama, and I was going for chic above all else. His clothes felt special to wear. I knew that much, in every single one of those dresses. 

It was snotty of me, I suppose, but if he wasn't still famous like Coco Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent, how much did he really matter?

Let's find out.