Born and raised on the West Side of Chicago, Barbara Bates has designed clothes for the likes of Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Harvey and Whitney Houston.
To celebrate 40 years of her company, Barbara Bates Designs, Bates is hosting a fashion show at the Barack Obama Presidential Center on Oct. 3. Forty models will show her work and that of four designers out of Columbia College.
Though Bates had to rework the show and expand seating after the first round of tickets sold out in May, she said that her community impact in Chicago and on the West Side has been more significant than her influence on the fashion industry.
“My impact is not really the big fashion thing. I don’t get huge fashion awards. It’s been for the community work that I’ve done. It had to do with what I saw growing up and how I grew up,” the self-taught designer told Austin Weekly News.
Bates used to live down the street from Garfield Park. Once Bates started gaining success from her design career, she began giving back to her neighborhood and other Chicago communities.
“I grew up in an era of tons of drug addiction on the West Side. Drugs were really rampant. Everybody had a family member that got caught up in them in some kind of way,” Bates said. She added that, later in life, she saw old school friends struggle with addiction. “Empathy has stayed with me throughout my entire career.”
Bates was pregnant at age 15, so when someone from her high school asked her to come speak to young, expecting moms at Bethany Hospital in East Garfield Park, she went, though reluctantly.
“I never talked about it in front of anybody. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want to go because I didn’t know what I was going to say. I didn’t understand the impact of sharing something like that,” Bates said. “I was crying. The girls in the room were crying, and I just felt like there was something that I was supposed to do.”
So, Bates told them that, if they graduated high school, she’d make their prom dresses. In 1999, she created a foundation to continue the annual initiative.
“I became the prom dress queen for like 20-something years,” Bates said, estimating that she’s designed 500 of the garments.
Bates is also known at Mount Sinai Hospital in Douglass Park, where her name is on the wall of the imaging center. In 2009, Bates was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I got so many people who reached out and prayed for me and were there for me until after I finished. I just thought, ‘Wow, I have a voice in the community. I need to use this voice to tell women that you need to be afraid. Breast cancer is out here so strong, and people don’t talk about it,’” Bates said.
To raise awareness for breast cancer and encourage people to get regular mammograms, Bates held a fashion show with 50 models who were all survivors of breast cancer. She raised $50,000 and donated it to Mount Sinai Hospital.
“The reason Mount Sinai is that I live in that neighborhood,” Bates said. “When there are hospitals in your neighborhood, they’re small, and they’re not the hospitals you want to go to. You always want to rush downtown to the big hospitals because we assume, because they’re big and fancy, they do a better job.”
She said Mount Sinai invited her to the hospital and taught her some of the history of the hospital and surrounding community.
“It was once an affluent Jewish neighborhood, but now it was an indigent neighborhood with African American and Latino people that could barely afford the treatment,” Bates said.
After she donated $50,000 to Mount Sinai, the hospital told her that, if she raised $500,000 in five years, they’d name an imaging center after her. In 2021, they did just that.
“We bought them their very first 3D breast imaging machine,” Bates said.
At the Oct. 3 fashion show at the Obama Presidential Center, “We’re asking people to donate $40 that will go straight into Sinai to the breast imaging center, and we’re hoping to pledge $40,000 to them that night,” Bates said.
After 40 years of Barbara Bates Design, Bates said she’s most proud of “the fact that we’re still here. I’ve seen something like Sears go away from here, and I’ve seen Saks Fifth Avenue close on Michigan Avenue,” Bates said. “To get up and be healthy enough to come here and provide work for other people, for their families. …I’m happy to still be here.”
History of Barbara Bates Design
Bates’ earliest memory of fashion and design include Barbie doll clothing.
“It was truly real, tailored clothing. It had the little plastic pumps, and the shoes and all of the accessories that went with it,” Bates said. She added that her mother and aunts were also beautiful and stylish. “My mom was always asked to be in hair shows. …I saw what beauty looked like, even though we lived right in the heart of the inner city.”
In high school, Bates won best dressed. She said she often searched for and bought fabric that her friends, who knew how to sew, would make into a pencil skirt or A-line dress.
Bates became even more known for her fashion sense when she was working as a secretary at First National Bank of Chicago.
“I would have girls come by my desk to see what I was wearing,” Bates said. Soon, she was designing clothes for her co-workers, too — finding fabric, taking their measurements, then sending it off to be sewed into a garment. “That’s how it started with building my own portfolio of clients. There were a lot of women who worked at the bank. …So there was a large audience to draw off of if you were interested in fashion.”
Bates began working with exotic skins, like leather and python, after searching for leather pants to buy herself and coming up short. She researched where to get leather from, found a manufacturer in New York and journeyed there to introduce herself.
“I was rapidly becoming the girl that sells these really cool leather outfits,” Bates said. She would meet people at parties and offer to design for them, advertising herself through word of mouth.
In 1986, Bates opened her own design company. Some of its first high-profile clients were basketball players. Bates said she saw Sam Perkins, who played basketball at the University of North Carolina with Michael Jordan, at a leather store and approached him. She made a pair of leather pants for Perkins, who connected her with Jordan.
“I had NBA players from all over coming to my studio to get some of the cool stuff that Michael was wearing,” Bates said.
When asked what advice she has for young people who want to turn a self-taught hobby into a successful career, Bates said connections and networking are paramount.
“People do buy you first, and then they buy your product. So, you want to have the one thing that is worth more than money, and that’s relationships,” Bates said. “Start honing in on relationships now. Save those relationships. You get to go back to them later on in life and use them in ways that you never really thought of.”
And when it comes to advice for emerging fashion designers, Bates said that clothing doesn’t have to be overly whimsical or revolutionary.
“You want to make money. You want to have a living that can sustain you for generations,” Bates said. “You want to put everything into it and make it the best that you can make it. And it probably needs to be something that’s wearable, not something that’s so way-out that you get accolades for it.”
Tickets to the 40th anniversary Barbara Bates fashion show at the Barack Obama Presidential Center on Oct. 3 start at $268 and can be purchased at https://events.eventnoire.com/e/40th-anniversary-barbara-bates.