Behind the Seams, Liberace’s Fur Designer Anna Nateece
Keeps His Fashion Legacy Aliv
Anna Nateece is not easily intimated. In fact, some of the fur cape creations the petite, Grecian designer has so intricately sewn from scratch stack up to nearly twice her own weight and size. So when one of the great musical icons of the ’60s strolled into her boutique with his entourage one day, Nateece simply did what she does best: she dressed him, and demonstrated her eye for style. By the end of the evening, Nateece and Lee Liberace, the famously flamboyant pianist, had become friends. He commissioned a handful of pieces from her, valued at a large sum of money. She was just 25.
That meeting was not by chance – Liberace had heard about her work from the royal family in Greece – but it was the beginning of what would become her life’s work. “Over the years to come, I had no time,” the 70-year-old says. “I was so devoted. My time was not my own, it was all Liberace’s time.”
Born and raised in Athens, Greece, Nateece had an inherent flair for fashion. “I worked with designing, dressmaking, and pattern making in school, which I enjoyed very much,” she says. “I love fashion, it has been in my blood ever since I was born.” After graduating from university, Nateece met and married her first husband, a medical doctor, and they moved to the United States, settling down in Boston, Mass. She worked as a model and in clothing design for a few retailers, building up a large clientele of influential and wealthy names on the East Coast.
After five years, the couple moved to Las Vegas in 1970, and she began work at a fine apparel salon inside the Flamingo Hilton. It was there that destiny intervened and her meeting with Liberace took place. “He said, ‘I want you to design a stop-traffic showpiece’,” Nateece says. “At the time, this was very flamboyant for the stage. My idea was to try on a cape that I had on the boutique floor that was designed at the time for another big name, Cyd Charisse, Tony Martin’s wife. I convinced him I could make a gorgeous cape for him with rhinestones, the whole lining, and load it with thousands and thousands of rhinestones. [We did] as many as five fittings [at his home] on Shirley Avenue.”
Nateece adds that though the cape was becoming heavier at each fitting, Liberace demanded more rhinestones every time. “He loved it, the more glamour,” she says. “It was very spectacular. It was a stage piece.” (Pre-white leather jumpsuit, it is rumored that Liberace was the one to advise Elvis Presley to add more glitz to his own stage wardrobe in order to “wow” a Las Vegas audience.) Liberace was so extraordinarily pleased with the finished order, Nateece became a valued asset to his team, and she created multiple couture pieces for him every year.
Nateece had a creative gift all her own, as her specialty was fur components of each costume. She worked alongside Michael Travis, whom Liberace brought on as his costume designer to make the beaded suits and non-fur pieces.
“In the very beginning, I loved the idea I was doing everything myself, especially for Lee, all the showpieces,” she says. “I just wanted everything to be from me to him, but over the years I became so very busy that I had five ladies working for me.” Nateece married her second husband, a master furrier, in 1973, and the couple set up a fur salon at the Dunes Hotel. She never worked exclusively with Liberace, but then again, no other client’s request ever measured up to his extravagant visions of sparkly fur coats with trains more than one foot long, either.
Nateece was able to keep working for other regulars, fulfilling requests for clothing, accessories and fur pieces, and soon become a beloved designer for numerous entertainers. Celebrities heard about her and requested their own show-stopping costumes. Her list of clients include showbiz personalities like Liza Minnelli, for which she made a Russian sheepskin tuxedo, James Caan, Dionne Warwick, and Lindsay Wagner as well as well-known local names like the Wynns, Goodmans, Newtons and Rogichs. Favoring the flashy look that fur gave them, numerous sports celebrities from the worlds of wrestling, boxing and golf ordered exquisite items from Nateece.
A young Mike Tyson and Don King visited her boutique at the Dunes Hotel on more than one occasion.
Nateece also met a budding supermodel named Naomi Campbell, who at age 17 was on the brink of international superstardom. “Over the years we became very good friends,” she says. She created several items for the beauty, such as a natural Russian golden sable coat, a white mink bolero, and a stole of chinchilla and black fox trimmed with black sable. Campbell was so fond of her star designer that, when Nateece landed in the hospital, she took time to call her. “I know the good parts of Naomi,” she says. “It was wonderful that she had become almost a superstar, but she took the time to call me a few times from New York.”
Naturally, it wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling, and Nateece was contacted about designing some pieces for a new movie shooting in town called “Casino”, which was set in the alluring scene of 1970’s Las Vegas. One of the film’s main characters was based on one of her real clients. Working with actress Sharon Stone, Nateece says she designed nearly 35 luxurious pieces for the film, mostly lavish, floor length fur coats and wraps that Stone’s character, the glamorous Ginger, wears throughout the film. Nateece attended numerous fittings in Stone’s suite and on set, and is proud of the credit she received for her work in “Casino”.
But Nateece worked closest within the realm of Liberace, a man who was so generous to those close to him, she often had to work overtime making furs and clothing for his entire personal and professional staff, plus family members. “Between his company, every name I told you, he would buy for them,” she says. “Every Christmas, every birthday. He’s beautiful. He kept his housekeepers so beautiful, so well-dressed, every one of them had lovely things from me. Lee was so perfect.”
Nateece’s creations for Liberace are her finest pieces of art, and some of her most magnificent showstoppers have stories all their own. They are breathtaking capes Liberace has been pictured in over and over again, highlighting his outrageously expensive taste. The black diamond mink boasts 40,000 crystals, each one meticulously hand sewn to the inside of the cape so it would practically blind the audience when Liberace walked on stage. It was alarmingly heavy too, weighing in at 150 pounds. Totaling about one carat worth of Austrian rhinestones, it took more than six months to make. (The item, which is seemingly priceless, had the highest appraisal price out of all the items at the museum.)
The other piece was a 12-foot-wide cape made of Norwegian blue shadow fox that had a 16-foot-long train. Liberace claimed it one of the most expensive furs in the world. Another scene-stealing costume was a silver beaded number with rhinestones and pearls, and intricate designs on the front and back of the costume. He wore this under another Nateece creation: a floor-length platinum Azurene mink coat, which featured a 36-inch opera cape trimmed in fox. The impressive outfit was worn by Liberace while touring, most notably at the Las Vegas Hilton.
Though Nateece gets starry-eyed when reminiscing about her golden days lavish luxury fur at the helm of Liberace, she insists she stopped fur design for good five years ago. Due to the revelations in the fashion industry regarding cruelty to animals, Nateece says it’s a delicate topic. “I’m very sensitive to talk about the animals,” she says. “I don’t do furs anymore. I won’t wear them anymore. At the time, I didn’t know better. I was a designer, a creator. I didn’t know what they did.” She says in that era, everyone wore fur and there was little stigma attached. “Those days it was so much in fashion. The Queen of England, the Queen of Greece, all the kings, and the renaissance period, they all have furs. But I know if Lee was alive today, he would feel the same as myself. He was a very sensitive man.”
Nateece continued to design for Liberace through his final performance at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 1986. She is currently on the Board of Directors for the Liberace Foundation for the Performing & Creative Arts. She consistently works with The Liberace Museum on East Tropicana Avenue to preserve both his honor and her collection of pieces on display.
As far as her own fashion rules, Nateece insists women should keep it classy. “First of all you have to have class,” she says. “Class has nothing to do with education. You play with accessories, and then to me, that’s a woman who makes a statement no matter where she goes.” Though Nateece admits fashion has drastically changed from dressy to more casual, she is fond of the old-fashioned, detailed-oriented way of designing. “We have so many young designers, and I love them all, but I am from the era of Coco Chanel, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta,” she says. “I appreciate that. I like something that you have to work hard, to create something that can be a masterpiece, something that a woman can wear for many years. You have a value there.”
