Giorgio Sant’Angelo, 50; Designer Noted for Stretch Fabrics in Clothes

Giorgio Sant’Angelo, a fashion designer noted for his futuristic designs and use of stretch fabrics, has died of lung cancer in a New York hospital. He was 50.

Sant’Angelo died Tuesday, three months after the cancer was diagnosed.

“Stretch is key for me,” Sant’Angelo told Women’s Wear Daily last year. “It’s both contemporary and practical. It’s flattering and she (the wearer) can pack it and she can wash it. . . .

“It will never look like a stuffed sausage,” he said.

Slinky Comfort

Noted for putting spandex into fabric for evening dresses and day wear, as well as bathing suits, over the last two decades, the designer believed that stretch meant comfort, as well as a slinky look.

Although his clinging designs were worn by shapely women like Lena Horne, Bianca Jagger and Faye Dunaway, Sant’Angelo insisted his clothes were meant for all body types.

“I have customers who are 350 pounds,” he said last June after introducing his highly praised fall line. “I don’t do anything with just fantastic bodies in mind.”

Born a count in Florence on May 5, 1939, to Domingo and Leilla Ratti de Sant’Angelo, the designer grew up on his grandparents’ farm in Argentina. He credited his grandmother with shaping his ideas on style and said he learned much about what chic women could do with a flat piece of fabric when he traveled as a child with his grandmother to Indonesia, China and India.

He studied architecture in Buenos Aires, industrial design in Barcelona and art at the Sorbonne in Paris before coming to the United States in 1962 to work as a cartoonist for Walt Disney Studios in Los Angeles.

Fashion entered his life by accident. Working as a textile designer in 1967, he picked up a few pieces of plastic and created geometrical jewelry that won praise from the late Vogue editor and fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland.

Coty Award

The jewelry won him his first Coty award and the patronage of Vreeland, who sent him off to Colorado with a suitcase full of fabric and the model Veruschka, commanding him to return to New York with clothes, which she then splashed over the pages of Vogue.

He won another Coty for clothes in 1970 and the Council of Fashion Designers of America award, which replaced it, last year for his use of stretch fabrics.

Although Sant’Angelo’s career became the fashion business, he continued designing furniture, including that in his Manhattan home, and won the Inspiration Home Furnishings Award in 1978.

Sant’Angelo, who dropped his title and the “de” from his Italian surname to appear more American, came to consider himself an American designer and a New Yorker.

Praised through the 1960s, criticized in the ‘70s and recently enjoying a comeback, Sant’Angelo remained sanguine about his following, commenting last June: “I’ve been praised for years, and I’ve been knocked for years. . . . But one cannot lose talent. If one is good, he is good.”

Sant’Angelo is survived by a brother, Hector, of Rosario, Argentina.