Getty Miller's Journey through American Mass-Market Fashion: Part II

Seventies fashion, parties, teaching, and AIDS

The other day I introduced you to Getty Miller and brought you up through 1968. Today I cover the rest of his career and life, ending with his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992.

Getty Miller, Women’s Wear Daily, March 10, 1969.

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When the 34th Street department store Franklin Simon launched their “Design America” group of “young designs who mould and shape the American fashion scene” in 1969, Getty Miller was one of them alongside others including Carol Horn, Willi Smith, and a just-starting-out Liz Claibourne. By that time, he had resigned from Glenora and Kelita and joined the newly founded junior sportswear firm Leapfrog. As his hair got longer, so too did his personal clothes get wilder. He was known for dressing “himself with the same daring flair that he puts into his youthful designs for women”—for one interview, he wore a “floor-length gray flannel coat, over a tank top and gray jersey pants, belted at the waist with South American donkey's teeth on a string. A mauve open-necked shirt completed the look.” When he attended the Coty Awards that October (for which he was nominated for a Winnie), he cut quite a dash in a navy velvet midi coat faced with navy satin and a jaunty white jabot shirt. Bill Cunningham, then writing for the Chicago Tribune, described Miller as looking like a “pre-Raphaelite portrait.”

An ad for Franklin Simons’s Design America, with Getty Miller for Leapfrog fringed Western shirt and panne velvet jeans at far right. New York Times, August 24, 1969.

Getty Miller at the Coty Awards with Maureen Lynch. Photo by Bill Cunningham, Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1969.