Festive Lullaby Benefit

For the Lullaby Guild, this year’s Easter parade came down a fashion runway. Sunday afternoon and evening the guild presented productions of the 32nd annual Ebony Fashion Fair at the Hollywood Palladium, raising $35,000 for the Children’s Home Society of California.

“This is a double parade,” said guild president Pat Gibson as she looked out at the 3 o’clock show’s 1,500 guests. “There’s the fashion in the audience and then you’ve got the show up on stage.”

The event isn’t traditionally held on Easter, but the Fashion Fair is a touring show sponsored by the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, and this was the only date available. At least Easter is “a time when people want to feel festive,” said event chair Pat Williams-Graves, and what better way to be in a holiday spirit than by helping one of L.A.’s oldest African-American charities. The guild was the first black auxiliary to affiliate with the Children’s Home Society and has raised more than $670,000 in the past 40 years to assist the home in placing children for adoption.

“This is a great charity and the show really sells itself,” said KTLA’s Larry McCormick, who acted as emcee. “It’s a chance for the audience to come out, dress up and see a fashion show with a lots of dazzle and glitz.”

Though the show is primarily haute couture from designers including Yves St. Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior and Bob Mackie, there are some men’s fashion that elicits a Saturday-night-at-Chippendale’s response from the 80% female crowd.

“Men are always the main attraction,” said fashion writer Lori Chapman as a bare-chested man modeled silk leopard-skin pattern pajamas. “The fashion takes a back seat. You wait. When they come out in the bathing suits, they’ll tear the house down.”

It’s a miracle the Palladium survived.