By DANIEL TAUB
Staff Reporter
Nolan Miller, once the highest-paid costume designer in Hollywood, will be the first to tell you his glory days are behind him.
But what days they were. Miller used to fit some of the entertainment industry’s most glamorous women Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Jane Wyman.
While the 64-year-old Miller still designs clothing for some stars Joan Collins chief among them most of today’s movie and television stars do not wear the kind of clothes for which he is famous.
“I’m kind of a dinosaur,” Miller says, noting that actresses today are more likely to wear casual clothing than the couture-style gowns in which he specializes. “There’s no real excitement in dressing somebody who wears blue jeans and a sweatshirt throughout the movie.”
At one point in the ’80s, Miller had 40 people working for him at his shop on South Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills. He was designing costumes for six television shows, including “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat,” and the show that made him famous, “Dynasty” all produced by Aaron Spelling. At the time, Miller was making $35,000 a week, making him Hollywood’s highest-paid designer.
If Miller was having a bad day, he would have his office filled with flowers, cost be damned. And the answer to getting around town then was, “Call a limousine.”
“We thought we were living in ‘Dynasty.’ We didn’t know the party was ever going to end,” he says, sitting in an office where photos of the actresses wearing Miller-designed clothing line the walls. “The ’80s, the glorious ’80s. The ’80s were wonderful.”
Wonderful, but also tiring. Workdays often started at 5 a.m., when Miller would do a fitting with Collins or Linda Evans. Sometimes the day wouldn’t end until 3 a.m., when Miller was putting the finishing touches on a gown needed on the set of “Dynasty” or “Hotel” the next day.
“I lived here,” Miller says. “It just never ended. And we would finish one thing we would have the clothes ready for ‘Dynasty,’ and if they didn’t add a scene or if they didn’t change the script around or something, then all of a sudden they would telephone me from the studio and say, ‘We’ve just signed Ginger Rogers and Mr. Spelling said you would make all of her clothes for her.’
“And it was always a gimmick. We would make all of their clothes and he would give them to them as a gift. So it wasn’t just throwing something together.”
But Miller, who first got interested in fashion when he was catching Saturday matinees while growing up in Texas, got to work closely with some of his idols.
“I would have six to eight fittings a day. And it would be Crawford, Stanwyck, Eleanor Parker, Lana Turner, Jane Wyman, Bette Davis. The biggest problem I had was making sure that all of Crawford’s photos were out of the fitting room when Bette Davis arrived. I had to make sure that the day Stanwyck was coming, I couldn’t have Lana Turner here the same day.”
As the 1980s came to a close, fashion trends started to change. The glamorous Ronald and Nancy Reagan left the White House, the economy took a downturn and fashion-focused TV shows “Falcon Crest,” “Dallas” and “Dynasty” no longer dominated the airwaves.
“All of a sudden, everything changed over,” he says. “And everything got much simpler.”
In the early ’90s, Miller opened a factory in the garment district downtown and made a foray into manufacturing clothes for department stores. While the venture was somewhat successful, with the clothes making their way into Neiman-Marcus and other department stores, Miller found that running a factory was more expensive, time consuming and difficult than he had imagined.
Dealing with department store buyers “frustrated designers,” according to Miller and making appearances around the country proved to be too taxing. The venture lasted for just a year and a half. “I found out it wasn’t easy to be Calvin Klein,” he says.
Today, Miller licenses his designs to a New York apparel maker keeping his name in department stores, but without the frustrations of manufacturing. Another designer, Mark Zunino, who occupies the office next door to Miller’s, also licenses his designs under the label “Mark Zunino for Nolan Miller.”
Miller, meanwhile, appears on the QVC home-shopping channel, where he makes regular appearances to hawk costume jewelry he designs, the Nolan Miller Glamour Collection.
At 6 feet, 5 inches tall, fit, and with a full head of slightly messy silver hair, Miller would not look out of place as a member of the Carrington family, on which “Dynasty” was centered. The Texas twang of his boyhood shows up occasionally, but for the most part he speaks with a cultured accent even pronouncing the word clientele “clee-ahn-tell.”
Miller came to Los Angeles to attend the Choinard Art Institute and worked in a Beverly Hills flower shop while trying to break into Hollywood. It was there he met Spelling, who came into the shop to buy flowers for a date. The owner introduced Spelling to Miller, saying someday the young man would design clothing for Spelling’s shows.
“Outside of our stars and our scripts, it was always our fashions on ‘Dynasty’ and ‘The Colbys’ and certainly on ‘Charlie’s Angels’ too,” Spelling says, adding that large shoulder pads in women’s suits something “Dynasty” helped popularize was one of Miller’s most memorable fashion contributions. “I had never seen broad shoulders on ladies, and I said, ‘This isn’t going to work, this isn’t going to work.’ Of course, that was one of the biggest things on our shows. He’s marvelous.”
Though Miller is approaching the age when many retire, and he has become much more reliant on Zunino, Miller says he has no plans to stop working.
“Retiring?” he asks, clearly taken aback. “Not until they take me out of here. I’ve had the flu and I stayed home for a couple of weeks and I was almost crazy doing that.”
