When Hollywood reporters used to interview designer Omar Kiam, their first question was usually, “What is your real name?”
Certainly the six-foot-two, hazel-eyed, New York couturier with the ruddy complexion must have made up that sobriquet when he came to Hollywood to design for Goldwyn Studios in 1934. The fact was, he had not. He was born Alexander Omar Kiam Jr., in Monterrey, Mexico, on July 19, 1894. Though he went by “Alex” as a child, his schoolmates at Riverview Academy, a boys military school in Poughkeepsie, New York, preferred his middle name. From then on, the future designer was known as Omar.
He was born into a prominent Houston, Texas, family that had emigrated from Alsace, France two generations before. His mother, Maria, who was from St. Louis, married Alexander Sr. in Monterrey on July 20, 1893. She may have died giving birth to Kiam or soon thereafter, as Alex Sr. and his son returned to Houston without her soon after Kiam’s birth. Kiam was sent away to be raised by his paternal aunt and grandmother in Connecticut, while Alex Sr. stayed behind in Houston to help manage Kiam’s Mammoth Clothing Store, his brother Ed’s haberdashery catering to Houston’s upper middle class.
After completing his studies at Poughkeepsie’s Riverside Academy in 1909, Kiam reunited with his father in Houston, where he got his first design job at his uncle’s clothing store, designing caps for infants. Then he was off to the University of Texas, but Kiam lasted all of one week as a freshman. He took a job with a wholesale millinery house in St. Louis, and six months later, headed back to New York, arriving in 1914.
In 1918, Kiam was sent to Europe for a one-year tour of duty during World War I. He was wounded, though not seriously, on October 17, 1918, just three weeks before Germany surrendered. Within three years of returning to the United States in 1919, Kiam made what would be the first of several trips back to Paris, this time to study fashion and work in couture. Throughout the 1920s, Kiam apprenticed for design houses on both sides of the Atlantic.
Designer Omar Kiam fits Betty Thomas for Vogues of 1938 (1937).
In 1929, Kiam finally opened his own clothing shop on 46th Street in Manhattan. Soon he began designing for Broadway, though he would always say that he never sought a career as a costumer. Broadway came to him. During the next seven years, Kiam designed for several shows, including Dishonored Lady, starring Katharine Cornell, Reunion in Vienna, starring the husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and the original staging of Dinner at Eight in 1932.
In 1934, Kiam left New York to become head designer for Samuel Goldwyn. Although Kiam designed for all of Goldwyn’s varied pictures for the next four years, he gained a reputation for his period costumes, which he especially enjoyed designing. Kiam took pride in getting every detail absolutely correct even though, in the end, it may not show on-screen. “It all goes to create in subtle ways the atmosphere you’re after,” he said. “For instance, all the stockings in Clive of India were especially made of unusually heavy silk. They didn’t have thin silk stockings in those days.”
Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights (1939).
In designing modern clothes, Kiam strove for flair while still being pragmatic. In These Three (1936), Merle Oberon and Miriam Hopkins had a scene where their characters renovate an old house. Putting the pair in dresses would have been absurd, while shorts might have seemed inappropriately titillating. Rather than evade the dilemma with slacks, Kiam turned to traditional men’s overalls for inspiration, designing feminine work clothes, complete with plaid gingham blouses.
In addition to Goldwyn, Kiam also worked for Hal Roach, and later, David O. Selznick, designing no fewer than twenty-eight changes for Janet Gaynor in A Star is Born (1937). For a man who seemed to enjoy costume design so much, Kiam’s career was brief. Wuthering Heights (1939) was his last film. “There is a great difference between designing clothes with no one person in mind and designing clothes for an individual,” he once said. “I prefer to and find it more interesting to design for a great many women than just a few.” He returned to New York and became chief designer for Ben Reig in 1941, creating elegant, simple, luxurious, and expensive couture for the women of Manhattan until his death on March 21, 1954. In the seven months prior to his death, he had attempted to recuperate from a heart ailment at the Ritz Tower Hotel, but he never rallied. He was fifty-nine.