Used with permission of CMA Closeup News Service
By Lorie Hollabaugh
In a quiet old building on Nashville's west side, a few blocks from the bustle of Music Row and Downtown, sits a hidden treasure - the shop of noted Western wear designer Manuel. Walk in the door and you'll feel like you've reached the end of the rainbow. Brilliantly colored jackets and garments that gleam and sparkle like diamonds are hung all about, daring the eyes to dance from color to color and leaving you feeling as if you might have glimpsed a Supernova. Then there are the photos of legendary entertainers that line the walls, silent testimonies to the artistry and popularity of a man who has influenced the entertainment world for more than four decades.
Manuel is more than a clothing designer. His story is the American Dream. So it is fitting that his latest project, a collection of 50 state jackets, each painstakingly tailored to include specific details from each state's history, is being honored with an exhibit at Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts. The collection is his way of saying thanks to a country that has offered him a life nearly beyond his imagination. Manuel dresses stars including Bob Dylan and Elton John, and counts many of them as friends.
As a young boy growing up in a small village in Mexico, Manuel Cuevas Martinez once sold oranges on the side of the road to make money for a ticket to see a Western starring the Lone Ranger. Years later, as the chief designer in famed Western wear purveyor Nudie Cohen's shop in California, Manuel's first custom order was to design a shirt for none other than Clayton Moore - the Lone Ranger himself. From the time his brother first sat him at a sewing machine, Manuel's destiny was set, and he knew America was the place to make his dreams come true.
"I was kind of a little sponge," Manuel recalled. "I read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and in those years I was living in my own world and it was nothing but fantasy. And living with great parents there was so much to absorb and live for. I was impregnated with happiness! I was one of those little nerdy, stupid, good little students - second to none throughout my school life. I was well behaved, a great Mama's boy. Then my brother taught me the sewing machine, and I just fell in love with that."
After studying psychology at the University of Guadalajara, Manuel came to the states armed with skills in leather tooling, tailoring, designing, embroidering and boot making.
During the 1930s and '40s, as cowboy stars Tom Mix and Gene Autry rose to stardom, several immigrant custom tailors also found prominence. Rodeo Ben, Nathan Turk and Nudie Cohen brought their colorful fabrics, whimsical detailed embroidery, and elements of Slavic folk art to their designs, and the Western entertainers were soon snatching them up as quickly as they could be turned out. Manuel arrived in Los Angeles during the height of this era in the mid-1950s, and took a job as a fitter with Sy Devore, the Hollywood tailor to clients including Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. Soon after, he went to work at the studio of master embroiderer Viola Grae, who taught him how to use the embroidery machines that are crucial to his design process today.