NEW YORK, NY.- Michael Leva, who was a celebrated young fashion designer on the verge of national prominence, then pivoted to a career as a fashion executive and branding consultant, died Sep. 14 in Providence, Rhode Island. He was 62.
His friend Maggie McCormick said the cause was heart failure.
Women’s Wear Daily in 1989 declared Leva one of “The New Majors,” noting a few months later that he was “evolving into a design talent to be reckoned with.” The short-lived New York City weekly 7 Days put him on its cover in March of that year for its “Designers on the Verge” feature. The Los Angeles Times in 1990 heralded Leva, then 29, as part of “New York’s new guard” — buzzy, young designers like Jennifer George, Rebecca Moses and Gordon Henderson.
“We’re all very different in what we do but similar in the sense of affordability,” Leva told the newspaper. “Our clothes are a little more real.”
Vogue profiled Leva in 1989, noting his sober mien, which the writer likened to that of a “new age monk,” and his good manners: “He’s the sort of person that says thank you — and really means it.”
Leva made his fashion debut in 1986 with tie-dyed taffeta evening dresses on models who strode out to music by Nico and the Velvet Underground. The show, held in the Soho boutique of nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch, was paid for by his parents.
Soon after, Aileen Newquist, a former analyst at Morgan Stanley who had been a high school friend of Leva’s, organized a group of investors to finance his business. “I want to make clothes that are special and new, not just weird,” he told The Miami Herald in 1986. His work matured quickly.
“His clothes were often described as Beene-like, but he was no copyist,” said Amy Fine Collins, an art and fashion historian and muse of designer Geoffrey Beene, in a phone interview. “His shapes were based on the natural world and the body itself. He was a refined colorist. Especially in a series of Rothko-inspired dresses he did one season, you could see how well he understood the musicality of color and proportions. His clothes were feminine, American and extremely modern.”
“Mr. Leva designs with a deceptive, almost repetitive, simplicity,” Woody Hochswender of The New York Times wrote in April 1991, when Leva’s collection featured the simple wool crepe dresses inspired by the paintings of Mark Rothko.
“His fashion was like Michael himself,” Wendy Goodman of New York magazine said in a phone interview. “It was joyous and fresh and made to wear, as clothes were back then.”
By July of 1991, however, Leva, then 30, announced he was shuttering his business, caught in a Catch-22 that many successful young designers encountered, as Hochswender put it. He had been selling briskly at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, among other stores, but did not have the money to fill the orders for the next season.
“This is a question of capital and capital alone,” he told Hochswender, adding that he had been trying to sell the company for two years.
“I hope to be back very soon,” he said. “I don’t feel beaten. I’m ready to get right back in there.”
He did return, for a few seasons starting in the fall of 1993, backed by Cotton Inc., a trade organization that sponsored three other young designers as well. Anne-Marie Schiro of the Times called Leva’s spring show a “welcome return” and praised the “snappy young styles he does so well.”
By 1995, however, he was consulting for a Japanese company, the Miki Corp.
“It’s good money for very little headache,” he told Constance C.R. White of the Times. “I literally made no money when I worked on my own. I make good money now.”
Michael Leva was born Jan. 15, 1961, in Denville, New Jersey, and grew up in Morristown. His father, James, was an electric utility company executive. His mother, Marie (Marinaro) Leva, was a homemaker and middle school librarian.
He had planned to study landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design but switched his major to apparel design his first year. “I liked the immediacy of grabbing the fabric, throwing it on the form, pinning it,” he told Vogue in 1989. “It’s similar to what I love about gardening: the hands-on experience. Architecture is just tons of planning and drawings, and, you know, I just lost interest in it.”
Leva was an ardent, skilled gardener. Even after he began his fashion business, his mother told the Times, he would take the train out to northern New Jersey to his parents’ house in Chester and work in the garden until dark. He created an all-white perennial garden there, which was his inspiration for his all-white evening collection in the spring of 1990. It “drew praise for its delicate fabrics and flowing lines,” the Times reported.
After closing his business, Leva was a branding and design consultant for various companies, including Macy’s, J.Jill, Victoria’s Secret, Casual Corner and C. Wonder, the short-lived retail venture of Christopher Burch, Tory Burch’s former husband. He helped write “Recipes for Parties” (2014), a book on entertaining, with Nancy Parker. He moved to Rhode Island in 2018 and lectured at RISD.
He is survived by his partner, Clifton Brown; his mother; his sister, Linda Leva; and his brothers, James and Christopher.
When Leva was a student at RISD, he was already sure of his talent and skills, said Richard Pandiscio, the veteran art director of Paper Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler and Interview magazine who was Leva’s boyfriend at the time.
“He was both a pixie and a bulldog,” he wrote in a text message, “petite and funny but ferocious when provoked (or when he didn’t like what you were wearing).”
“He loved to entertain,” Pandiscio continued. “He could pull together an elaborate dinner party in his dorm room with no more resources than a hot plate and a bathroom sink. He was the first student I ever met who cared about tableware, proper pots and pans, and a linen napkin.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
