Full skirts that swirled, vibrantly colored cotton, elaborate detailing like glistening gold rickrack. This was the look in vogue in the 1950s. More specifically, it was the look of the so-called “squaw” dress — a style that put Tucson on the fashion map.
Dolores Gonzales is credited with popularizing the western look that swept across the country. Back in 1956, the Los Angeles Times dubbed her “the Dior of the Desert.”
“She was instrumental in creating this western dress style,” said Demion Clinco, president of the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation. “This aesthetic really got pushed out across the country. It became this huge phenomenon.”
So huge that Gonzales, along with her sister Maria Barcelo, had tea with First Lady Mamie Eisenhower at the White House, recalls Gonzales’ son Bob Gonzales, 72, who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo. Eisenhower was a fan. First Lady Pat Nixon and her daughters also wore his mother’s designs, Gonzales said.
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Dolores Gonzales’ work will be one of the featured exhibits at the fourth annual Tucson Modernism Week, which starts Friday, Oct. 2. Modernism week, which despite its name started off as a three-day series and now spans more than seven days, highlights Tucson’s post-war past.
The Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation, which puts on the event, contacted Gonzales’ family, spread out in Colorado and California, and vintage stores, hunting for her designs. The foundation spent more than a year tracking down dresses and bought 11.
“The dresses are really, really charming and beautiful,” Clinco said. “They’re really gorgeous. All together they make this unbelievable design palette that I think really reflects Tucson in the 1950s. It captures the exuberance and this push toward the modern and combining the old and new into something fresh and that became a countrywide trend. Actually, I would say it was a craze.”
In 1930, the city was little more than a teeny burg but by 1950, Tucson took off.
“The city was exploding in size and with different ideas that people were bringing with architecture and design,” said Clinco.
The squaw dress, though, wasn’t an entirely new idea. Native Americans had long been wearing broomstick and tiered skirts, and the late, legendary dress-shop owner Cele Peterson, who opened her first store in 1931, recalled selling them in the early ’30s, according to Star archives.
But it was Gonzales’ special touches that helped the dresses become popular years later.
Gonzales was born in Mexico in 1907, but the family fled the country seven years later when — after one of Pancho Villa’s raids — they found a bullet on the young girl’s pillow.
“We still have that bullet,” Bob Gonzales says.
They came to the United States, and Gonzales followed her family to Tucson in 1940, working with her sister who’d opened a dress shop at 144 N. Stone Ave., called Irene Page. After Barcelo sold the store to Gonzales, Irene Page became the Dolores Shop. The mother of two boys eventually opened a factory with 25 machines and 30 workers, according to a 1995 Star story.
Despite the high title bestowed upon her by the Los Angeles Times, his very grounded mother took the praise in stride and continued to work 40-50-hour weeks, Bob Gonzales says.
“She did all of the design work, cutting the patterns,” Gonzales said. “She did it all. I would go down there and wrap rickrack and braid back on their spools as part of my job.”
It was those elaborate trims that made Gonzales’ pieces stand out then — and now in today’s vintage market, according to Sabino Gutierrez of L.A.-based Clever Vintage Clothing, which will put on a fashion show during Modernism Week.
Clothing with the Dolores label was highly prized for those extra details as well as the sumptuous fabrics, Gutierrez said.
Jane Pitts — who owns Ozma Atelier, a designer men’s and women’s resale boutique at 439 N. Sixth Ave. that also specializes in vintage — recently came across a Dolores original. She remembers buying her first squaw dress at a thrift store in 1972 when she was 14 and ended up collecting an assortment of them.
“They’re so inventive,” she said of the dresses. “Such great use of color.”
But, as always happens with fashion, interest began to fade with the next decade. In 1962, the Dolores Shop shut down.
Clinco hopes to preserve the fashion flair of Tucson’s past by placing the Dolores dresses on regular exhibit somewhere.
“Our hope is to find a permanent home for them,” he said, “so this piece of Tucson’s history can be shared.”
