Cardinali Skirts

Marilyn Lewis, the late American designer behind Cardinali and the classic Marlo Thomas sitcom continues to influence fashion today.

Despite Lewis’s relatively short career, lasting just nine years — the Ohio native gave up fashion in 1977 to focus on her marriage to actor Harry L. Lewis — she made quite an impact on a certain coterie of L.A. insiders. Improbably, Lewis (1929–2017) met many of them through the legendary Sunset Boulevard restaurant Hamburger Hamlet, which she cofounded with her husband in 1950.

“Betsy Bloomingdale and Dyan Cannon knew Marilyn because she owned the hot Hamburger Hamlet,” says vintage-clothing dealer Ricky Serbin. Her patrons “were attracted to Cardinali because they knew style and quality,” he adds, pointing out that many of them also bought couture. More customers followed, including First Lady Nancy Reagan and singers Eydie Gormé and Dionne Warwick. Actress Marlo Thomas personally signed up Lewis to design the costumes for her hit television sitcom, That Girl, which ran from 1966 to ’71.

Fashion’s current nostalgia for the 1970s is partly what turned San Francisco’s Serbin on to Lewis, a self-taught creative who, as a teenager made fashion sketches and aspired to be a model. When she moved to the West Coast from her hometown of Cleveland, Lewis began designing under the name Cardinali, the label she founded in the late 1960s. Her collection was sold through Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman and other retailers.

Serbin wasn’t well acquainted with Lewis — one of a handful of so-called California couturiers based in Los Angeles at the time — but he recognized the “now-ness” of her designs.

Although Cardinali was an American fashion house, Lewis had a European flair that her customers gravitated toward, and many of her fabrics were imported from the region.

According to Harold Koda, fashion scholar and former curator in charge at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the name Cardinali — Lewis’s homage to her Italian grandmother — suggests an “affinity for Italian designers. The French knew how to do sexy, but the Italians knew how to do sensual.”

Lewis — who couldn’t sew but created everything from black silk jersey blouses and wool winter hats to tweed suit skirts and colorful floral day dresses — understood, as did her fellow designer Yves Saint Laurent, that women of the time wanted to feel sexy without looking gauche. 

“Good designers of that era caught on to providing comfort at the same time as showing curves and skin,” says Marci Rosenberg Samuels, a Houston-based collector who deals under the name Mrs. Couture and wears both Cardinali and YSL. “Cardinali did that, Saint Laurent did that, and so did Stephen Burrows and Giorgio di Sant' Angelo in their own ways.”

And the easy ’70s sensibility that Lewis and so many others championed? It is alive and well, as evidenced by the runway creations of designers Alessandro Michele and Pierpaolo Piccioli and the number of celebrities lining up to wear them, from musicians Florence Welch and Rihanna to actress Tilda Swinton.

Find vintage Cardinali evening dresses, suits and other clothing for sale on 1stDibs.