George Stinson was a dear and close friend for several years after I first moved to New York City. Born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, George had served aboard a destroyer in the Navy and then used his veteran's benefits and part-time jobs to work his way through a four year course at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida. He subsequently moved to New York, where he again used part-time jobs and teaching to finance his enrollment at one of the country's premiere fashion schools, The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Armed with his degree from FIT, George worked a variety of prominent Garment District jobs as a designer, pattern maker and cutter for many well known companies, designing a wide variety of clothes from men's sportswear and outerwear to women's evening wear and formals. That London Fog raincoat your father wore was probably designed by George.
The Seventh Avenue jobs paid the mortgage, but they were often nine-to-five drudge work. George's real dream was to be a theatrical costume designer. His mentor in Sarasota had been the head costume designer for the Ringling Brothers Circus. He was on the faculty at the Ringling School of Art and it was he who taught George the "secrets" of designing for elephants. (This inside knowledge must account for the remarkable transformations George was able to accomplish on certain of his leading sopranos.) But professional costume design in New York City is a difficult business to get into, due the abundance of talent that flocks to the city and a tightly controlled union.
Nonetheless, George's talent enabled him to garner a few non-union off-Broadway costume assignments until he finally found his dream job as the first regular costume designer for LOOM, The Light Opera of Manhattan. Originally a small Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company with a 52-week off-Broadway season, LOOM later expanded its repertory to include classic operettas of all genres, such as The Merry Widow and The Student Prince. The exotic locales and larger than life characters in these old romances suited George's sense of fantasy to a tee.
George with Bunny and Cory,
his assistants at LOOM.
(Yes, I know, the shirt. It was the '70's. You had to have been there.)
George's talent and creativity allowed him to work miracles on the tiniest of budgets and LOOM effectively became a second full time job for George until his health began to fail in 1984, leading to his untimely death two years later. LOOM, too, alas, has vanished. But as his best friend, I inherited a number of his personal effects, including many lovely pencil draft sketches and final watercolor renderings of his costumes for LOOM. For 18 years they have mostly sat in a trunk at the back of my closet, excepting a few I framed and still have on my walls. I think it's time they came out of the closet. Here is a sampling of his work. I hope to expand and improve the site as time allows.
More information on LOOM may be found hereat http://www.geocities.com/mdonadio/, Michael Donadio's fabulous site of performance photos of LOOM, and hereat the Musicals 101 LOOM Homepage at http://www.musicals101.com/loom.htm. Approximately a third of the photos on these sites display George's work, although many were taken at later revivals when budget constraints and poor maintenance conspired to give an inaccurate idea of the quality George's original work.
