PHOTOGRAPHs COURTESY BABBIE LOVETT
Left to right: Babbie Lovett with pink scarf, Lovett in stripes and dots, Lovett with paisley dress and fur, and Lovett with black and white shoes.
Summer begins on June 21st. It’s the longest day of the year, with the most continuous daylight. It’s also Babbie Lovett’s birthday, a fitting day, her friends say, because she is full of light. This summer, she’ll turn 93.
About two-and-a-half years ago, Babbie Lovett went blind. For a creative who’s built a name for herself as a model, show producer, store owner, and mentor in Memphis’ fashion industry — a very visual field — her blindness is, as she says, “inconvenient. It’s one of the most interesting times of my life. It’s a real journey of learning.”
To keep things simple, these days, she opts to wear an all-black ensemble. “That becomes my basic,” she says. “I try to remember scarves or different accessories that I put on top to make it happen. And I have so much stuff, but I’m just having a hard time now knowing what I look like because I haven’t seen myself for two years. And I have to laugh. I was a very beautiful person with makeup, and now I can’t wear makeup.
“Maturity teaches you that everything shifts. Everything that was perky becomes droopy. Maturity is kind of funny in that way. In fact, if it wasn’t happening to me, I’d write a funny book about it. But I’ve been so blessed, and every 10 years everything is changing, and I love change. …
“To me, life is a show,” she continues. “I love a beginning, a middle, and an end. And then sometimes it’s a soap opera, and it just keeps going. The beautiful thing about life is it goes on.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY BABBIE LOVETT
Tennessee Ballet Theater dancer Dasha Andrienko in Lovett’s orange Connie Fails jumpsuit.
As Lovett embraces this chapter of her life, Tennessee Ballet Theater (TBT) is preparing to honor the last nine decades of her many-chaptered life with The ICON, Babbie Lovett, Fashion Legend this April. Directed by Erin Walter, TBT’s artistic director, and with works choreographed by Max Robinson and Steven Prince Tate, the ballet will traverse the “peaks and valleys” of a long and active life, with four ballerinas representing Lovett. “There are 15 dances, and some are literal depictions of aspects of her life,” Walter says. “ome are abstractions from things that we were inspired by.”
This production will be the fifth installment of TBT’s “901 Stories,” which has brought to life histories through dance, including those of Earnestine & Hazel’s, the Annesdale Mansion, the Medicine Factory, and the Jack Robinson Gallery. “We like to celebrate things about Memphis that maybe people don’t know,” Walter says. “Maybe half of Memphis knows who Babbie is, but the other half doesn’t.”
Walter herself met Lovett when she was 13. “I modeled for her for a show at the Racquet Club, and I remembered Babbie for her statuesque beauty and her commanding presence,” she says. “I would see her around town and think, ‘Oh, that’s Babbie.’ But she was so intimidating to me that I never said anything to her, and now I can’t believe that I ever felt that way because she’s the most disarming, unassuming person.”
And to Walter, at least, Lovett is Memphis history.
Born in 1932 amid the Great Depression, in McCrory, Arkansas, Lovett spent her childhood playing “Let’s Pretend.” “When I was a little girl, there was no television, there were no pictures except movies,” she says. “I sat in front of that radio and heard the program Let’s Pretend. There were stories to tell; I could see those stories and the characters.”
Inspired by these tales, she would reenact what she remembered, perched in her grandmother’s walnut tree on her family’s farm. “I could climb up — it had a big V, and it was almost like I was on a stage. I would sit up there from the time I was about 3 or 4 years old.”
“These last 10 years, all my dreams seem to be coming true, because I’ve always wanted my collection to be used for education or for fundraising. It just thrills me to know that Tennessee Ballet was interested in it.” — Babbie Lovett
The stage called to her, even before then. “I learned to sing and dance my own way before I could walk,” Lovett says. Dance, though, was her first love, with her formal education beginning when she was 8 — in tap first, then ballet.
Even before Walter approached her to do The ICON, dance has proven to be a throughline in her life. That’s how she fell in love with her late husband, Paul. They met at a fraternity party at Rhodes College, then Southwestern. “He was so adorable,” she says. “He came over and asked me to dance, and the minute he did, I knew I was going to marry this man.”
Paul was the perfect dance partner for Lovett — in life, she would find out, but importantly on the dance floor that night. “I fell in love with him that night,” she says. “We married at the end of my sophomore year. We’d only known each other for about eight months, but I knew it from that night on. It took him about a week.”
Their first dance will be recreated in The ICON to Joyce Cobb’s “This Joint Is Jumping.” “I thought it was so interesting that moving was so important to her, expressing herself through moving,” Walter says.
“It still is,” Lovett adds. She’s kept up her dancing her entire life, taking a hip-hop class even in her eighties. “Hip-hop is the toughest of all dancing. It’s so hard.”
Even today, she’s still dancing. “I may be as blind as a bat, but in my head I’m just going to keep dancing,” she says. “There’s certain music I hear. I get up at night and sometimes I hold on to my walker and dance. And sometimes I hold on with one hand and pause there and we dance — Paul and I.
“There’s a song that I love called ‘Young at Heart’ [by Frank Sinatra], and I think that sums me up pretty well. I’m still a kid inside, but the outside is a little weary.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY BABBIE LOVETT
Tennessee Ballet Theater dancer Olivia Bran in Lovett’s Gabriele Knecht coat.
Growing up, Lovett knew of two heavens: Big Heaven and Little Heaven. Big Heaven was Goldsmith’s department store and Little Heaven was Levy’s Ladies Toggery clothing store, both on Main Street.
Her father, G.L. Morris, successful in the cotton industry, would sometimes bring her and her mother from their home in McCrory across the old bridge to Memphis, while he brought cotton samples to sell downtown. “We’d come down Riverside Drive, down Beale Street, turn left to go down Main Street,” Lovett says today. “He would say, ‘Cornelia’ —my mother’s name — he’d say, ‘Cornelia, do you want to stop at Big Heaven or Little Heaven?’”
He’d then drop them off at Cornelia’s chosen heaven, then visit the cotton markets himself. “And we would shop all day, have lunch, and have a wonderful time,” Lovett says.
From these trips that began practically as early as she can remember, she fell in love with Memphis. “And I’ve loved it passionately ever since.”
“Memphis has always been my New York,” Lovett says. “It was the heart of fashion because of the National Cotton Council [of America, which was launched in Memphis in 1938 as a lobby and trade organization for cotton production,] and the Maid of Cotton at Carnival Memphis. It was where the designers came from New York to Memphis, and that’s how I got involved. It was such a fashion center, and my prayers are that we make it that again.”
“One of the things that I first started loving was listening to the radio and now that I’m blind, I’m listening again. So it’s almost like a full circle for me. I think life’s a circle; life continues. There are different characters on the stage, but the stage is the same.” — Babbie Lovett
Lovett started her modeling career in ’58 after her son was born. “I was almost 30 years old,” she says. She’d begun sporting a shorter haircut when her friend Louise Hayes, a fashion coordinator at Goldsmith’s, asked if she’d do a photoshoot for the fashion week the stores and specialty shops put on at the time. After that, the modeling opportunities snowballed. Goldsmith’s and Levy’s wanted her for trunk shows, where she’d model clothes designers brought in.
“At that time, I was a dancer, so my body was in pretty good shape,” Lovett says. “I could turn clothes around and wear them backwards if I had to. I knew how to make the clothes look good. When the designers would bring their collections, they liked what I did, and some of them invited me to do their shows in New York. At that time, they were not runway shows. They were done in the showrooms, and it was done for the buyers.
Modeling was different in the ’60s than what it would become in future decades, Lovett says. “There’s a difference between the pageant of being a beauty queen and a model. A model is a hanger for clothes. If you can make the clothes look good, that’s what makes a good model. Basically the reason models in the beginning had to be tall and skinny was because of the camera. But now, models can be any size because of the way the culture has changed. Things are changing. I think it’s for the better.”
Lovett did her last show six months ago for the Madonna Learning Center’s annual fashion show fundraiser. “To me, the most important thing was doing shows, and I love to do fundraisers,” she says. Whether it was for the Madonna Learning Center, which serves children and adults with special needs, or the Baddour Center, a residential and learning community for adults with intellectual disabilities, she says working with nonprofits has been the most rewarding part of her fashion career.
That’s how Lovett became involved with Memphis City Beautiful, who asked her to put on its annual “trashion” shows from 2011 to 2019, where designers collected materials from dumpsters and curbs to create couture masterpieces for the runway. From it, she met many mentees, including Paul Thomas, who would become the “Recycle King” of Memphis and who is designing the set pieces for The ICON.
Lovett’s affinity for good causes is also why she was happy to work with the Tennessee Ballet Theater, whose Frayser Dance Project, now in its fourth year, offers free dance classes to students in the Frayser neighborhood. Sponsored by Nike and Alliance Healthcare, profits from The ICON will go to the Frayser Dance Project.
“That’s why I’m so excited about being a part of all of this,” she says, “because the funds that are raised when you do shows, if you get people interested, then you can get the contributions you need to preserve the arts or give people an opportunity that they didn’t have before.” Someone asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I’m a professional volunteer.’ And need income to volunteer, and so I’ve always tried to do things that gave me enough income that I could follow my passion, which is fashion and volunteering.”
When her husband died in 1987, Lovett ran his liquid fertilizer business, one of the first in the country. She owned clothing stores in Memphis and Arkansas. She even helped influence Hillary Clinton’s style when she and Bill moved into the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion in 1979. She produced a TV show in Little Rock, called Love Rock, to promote Arkansas musicians. She produced the Tony-nominated Broadway show Violet in 1997. “I went from learning how to get the rights for the book that the play was based on to handling all the legal aspects of it,” she says.
Over the years, Lovett also began working with the University of Memphis department of art and design, mentoring students in fashion and speaking to classes. Vincent Williams, a student in the program, is creating design elements for The ICON, making feathers out of packing foam in homage to the trashion that Babbie made chic in Memphis through her shows with Memphis City Beautiful.
The list of Lovett’s accomplishments goes on, her impact in fashion and the arts extending beyond Memphis.
“These last 10 years, all my dreams seem to be coming true,” Lovett says, “because I’ve always wanted my collection to be used for education or for fundraising. It just thrills me to know that Tennessee Ballet was interested in it.”
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has also taken interest in her collection. “They’ve taken 21 of my pieces, and hopefully at some point they’re going to use it as a fashion institute when they move downtown,” she says. “That’s a dream of mine, to have a fashion institute in Memphis similar to the one that’s in New York.”
Her collection of clothing, she estimates, consists of 2,000 to 3,000 garments. “I’ve got a house full and three apartments full of racks,” she says. “I’ve got racks just crammed full. My fashions are very basic. Everything can be worn anytime, and I think most of my collection can be worn today. You can always tell whether it’s the ’50s or the ’60s by the way the fit or the little signature of each decade.
“It’s like I have a whole box of paints and crayons that I can use. I can still put a show together for you if I can feel it. I put the show together for the University of Memphis [last year: “Memphis Fashion Through the Decades”]. I had 40 pieces. Most of the stuff I’m having to do by feel.”
For The ICON, Walter has incorporated pieces from Lovett’s collection in two numbers. “It thrills me because [the pieces in] my collection are really my friends,” Lovett says. “All of my clothes have a story with them. And they’ve never been worn but maybe once or twice, or most of them have been made for shows. And to see them dance just thrills me to death.”
A few pieces will also be on display as will Sue Ambrose’s couture designs constructed from bicycle tires. Old phones will be set up that, when picked up, will answer with recordings of Babbie telling stories from her life, moments not included in the show that, Walter says, “She says in a much better way than I was able to write [for the show’s monologues between the dances].”
In the meantime, Lovett looks forward to experiencing the ballet. “My talent has always been able to feel an audience, and to be able to see that audience was wonderful. But to be able to feel that audience now is also a gift, so I’m looking forward to feeling and hearing the show.
“One of the things that I first started loving was listening to the radio and now that I’m blind, I’m listening again. So it’s almost like a full circle for me. I think life’s a circle; life continues. There are different characters on the stage, but the stage is the same.”
See The ICON: Babbie Lovett, Fashion Legend, sponsored by Alliance Healthcare Services, at the McCoy Theatre at Rhodes College, Lovett’s alma mater, on April 4th and 5th, at 7:30 p.m., April 6th at 2:30 p.m., and April 11th and 12th at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $45 and can be purchased at tennesseeballettheater.com.
