Nationality Mexican-American | Occupation Fashion designer | |
Full Name Dolores Consuelo Barcelo Born June 6, 1907 Sonora, Mexico Died July 1994, California, United States | ||
Dolores Gonzales (1907–1994) was a Mexican–American fashion designer based in Tucson, Arizona. She is best known for blending Native American and Mexican clothing traditions to create distinctive southwest resort wear dresses known as patio dresses, the fiesta dresses, (also known as the pejorative squaw dress). She founded the company Dolores Resort Wear that manufactured dresses for the American market, selling in upscale department stores across the country. He iconic design was appropriated and copied by other designers throughout the southwest becoming seminomas with mid-twentieth century regionalist fashion of the American Southwest. The dress design became the official dress of the American Square-dancing movement.
Life
Born Dolores Consuelo Barcelo in the northern Mexican state of Sonora on June 6, 1907 to Father Helberto Barcelo and Mother Beatrice Barcelo. She immigrated to Douglas Arizona with her family in 1912 fleeing the country civil unrest.
She moved to Los Angeles in 1920 working in the LA garment industry. The Gonzales family moved to Tucson in 1938 and Dolores returned to southern Arizona in 1940.
Gonzales and her brother Richard Barcelo brought their sister's Maria Barcelo's dress shop Irene Page at 114 N. Stone Avenue after World War II and began experimenting with the broomstick skirt. All of Gonzales's dresses were made in a converted house – factory on West Council Street.
According to Dolores's Son Lee Gondolas, the store, called the Dolores Shop received orders from all over the world. Dolores also had market outlets in LA, Chicago, St. Louis and New York. IN 1956, a Los Angeles Times Reporter dubbed her "The Dior of the Desert." Major department stores sent buyers to the Dolores Shop to purchase dresses that sold for 100 to 300 (800–2400) in today's dollars.
Gonzales died in July 1994 in California.