Designer Dishes on Beyonce, Houston vs. Dallas Women and Dressing Russian Royalty

We love it when a designer dishes on the Houston or Dallas woman’s sense of style. So imagine our delight when Rubin Singer, maestro of magical gowns, shared insights on his client base across the country.

“Houston and Dallas are very different. Houston is more wild in sensibility. Dallas is more subdued, very fashion forward but more traditional,” he said from a private perch in Houston’s Elizabeth Anthony. “Dallas has a bit more society.

“Houston has more parties. There is a big difference from an outsider’s perspective.”

While shoppers were perusing his fall/winter collection on the second floor of the Uptown boutique, Singer mused further on fashionable women. The ladies of Houston, Los Angeles and Miami are similar in that they like “more color, they appreciate more daring elements. It’s more out there.” Chicago and New York shoppers favor darker, subdued fashion, he noted, while San Francisco and Dallas seem aligned in fashion preferences.

Singer was in town for his fall/winter trunk show at Elizabeth Anthony and for the runway presentation at Houston Community College’s “Passion for Fashion” luncheon.

Many in the luncheon crowd swooned over the “liquid” fabrics that gave many of the gowns an out-of-this-world luster. Singer developed the fabric with one of his mills in Italy. It’s created, he explained, by weaving nylon filament, twisted in a certain way, into silk.

Fashionistas already immersed in Rubin Singer will recall that his design of Beyoncé’s costume for the 2013 Super Bowl halftime performance catapulted the rising superstar into the headlines, only three years after embarking with his own fashion label.

“It really changed the trajectory of my career,” he recalled.

Singer comes by his design stripes naturally. His father created costumes for the Bolshoi Ballet. His grandfather was a celebrated couture designer in the Soviet Union, dressing Russian royalty, the social elite and political figures. That heritage, he says, is “omnipresent in my life. It is at the very core of my being and I can’t separate it.”

After taking  what he describes as a huge departure from his oeuvre with his ill-received spring 2017 collection, Singer says that he is back and has reached a comfortable point in his career.

“I really feel like I’ve now entered my stride so to speak in terms of who my customer is and what I do,” he said. “I cater to strong women. It’s about empowerment through clothing. I believe that clothing is a source of armor. It’s how you express yourself to the exterior world and it’s something that is very much imbued into my work.

“And at the end of the day, my job is to make women feel beautiful.”