Dorothy Liebes | 1. A Rough start

Textile designer and trendsetter, Dorothy Liebes was born on October 14 - or maybe the 15th - in 1897. Her birth certificate reads October 15, but she celebrated on the 14th throughout her life. A clerical error may explain the discrepancy as the original document was lost in the 1906 earthquake. Liebes was born two months premature – a precarious start in the days before NICUs – and it was common not to name a baby whose viability was uncertain. The line for the name she would eventually be given, Dorothy Katherine Wright, is blank.

Liebes’s fame in the first half of the 20th century stemmed from her drive to succeed, her early experimentation with synthetic fibers, a legendary eye for color, a fortuitous first marriage, and her world-class charisma. The first-born child of a civil servant and a teacher, Liebes’s rural Northern California beginnings were the warp into which remarkable experiences and opportunities were woven.

In her early teens, Liebes created her first design project, a replica of the gardens at Versailles in the side yard of her family home in Santa Rosa. Liebes saw a photo of the gardens in Volume V of John Stoddard’s Lectures. She employed her siblings as laborers, paying them with her allowance. She wrote, “It would have a round centerpiece, filled with yellow and white Shasta daisies, marigolds and red poppies. In the beds around it there would be lobelia, yellow and white roses, and alyssum . . . Lacking the boxwood of Versailles, I would use blue iris for borders.”

Liebes in the middle with her brother Bill, sister Tid, and Blue, their dog

When the garden was finished, Liebes wrote, it was “exactly as I had envisioned it, a miniature Versailles beside the barn, a bright splash of colors and nothing delighted me more than when neighbors came to look at it.” Liebes got her first taste of the elixir of publicity when the local paper praised another of her projects, painting flower pots and selling them at a sidewalk stand, the first in a lifetime of print accolades.