On her 60th birthday in 1998, Kay King plunged from an airplane. It was great fun, she says, and offered the added bonus of an "instant face lift."
In addition to jumping out of an airplane when she turned 60, mildmannered Houston Community College fashion chair Kay King once took a ride in a hot air balloon to celebrate her birthday.
1992 was the debut year of the Houston Oilers Dancers. Designer Kay King hand-cuts the fringe on dancer Dayna Bocca's uniform.
Kay King, who is the head of the fashion design and merchandising program at Houston Community College photographed in an exhibit of red dresses she put together in 2006.
Kay King, former head of the fashion design and merchandising program at Houston Community College, photographed in an exhibit of red dresses she put together in 2006.
Kay King designed the original outfits for the Derrick Dolls — the cheerleaders for the Houston Oilers.
Kay King in her home, with collectibles from her worldwide travels.
Collectibles from her worldwide travels, displayed in her Houston home in 2006.
Kay King in her home, with collectibles from her worldwide travels.
I had forgotten how I ended up on a goat farm in West Texas for a story about mohair more than a decade ago.
It came to me last week when I learned that Kay King, the former chair of Houston Community College's Consumer Arts & Sciences department, had died on Feb. 13 at 86. King gave me the idea.
She filled my head with excitement at the thought of tracking the production of mohair from Texas' Angora goat farms to Prada's fashion runway, which featured a vibrant mohair collection that season.
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I was covering fashion then and immersed in a world of trends, celebrity style and beauty treatments. King was an endless pot of gold for story ideas and nuggets of fashion history that I couldn't find in any sourcebook. No one had more enthusiasm about mohair than King, but that's how she was with everything. Undeniably happy about life, especially fashion.
"I have a Pollyanna personality; I like everything and everybody," King told me in a 2007 Chronicle interview. "It's not a good characteristic to have. It just seems there would be some things you don't like."
King was a fashion designer before she stepped into the classroom. She designed junior dresses for Kabro of Houston, a company that produced moderately priced women's dresses during the 1950s and '60s. The pay was meager, but her designs sold at stores nationally. She also designed a line of sportswear, which sold at the Houston-based Joe Frank Inc. and appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar magazines.
I recently found a Joe Frank blouse on Etsy and now I wonder if it was one of her designs.
In 1968, King was asked by former Houston Mayor Roy Hofheinz to design hundreds of employee costumes for the new AstroWorld amusement park in just one month. She also designed costumes for the Houston Oilers Derrick Dolls in the 1970s.
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After King helped develop a curriculum for the new fashion design program at HCC in 1981, she ended up teaching all the classes. In 1982, she became chair of HCC's fashion, interior design and photography department.
King saw thousands of students graduate over the years and took many students on trips to fashion houses in Madrid, Milan, New York, Paris and London. In 2006, she became the first Texan to serve as president of the Costume Society of America, an influential national organization of designers, academics and museum curators.
What I admired most about King was how much she genuinely cared about her students. Educators are saddled with so much these days, but King didn't buckle to challenges.
"This woman changed my life," said HCC fashion professor Alex Chapman, who met King shortly after his high graduation in 1988 when he submitted sketches for a fashion competition. "She was my fashion fairy godmother. She believed in me and always let me flourish. That's how she was with everyone. She was fearless and fought for her students and the program. If it wasn't for Kay, who knows where we'd be?"
Houston has never been able to hold onto the title of the state's fashion capital, unlike Dallas. It pains me to write that. But King worked tirelessly to bring more awareness to Houston's fashion talent, and she was the force behind the growth of HCC's fashion program. In 2005, she also started the school's fashion archives with a donation of 4,000 pieces of clothing and accessories from an East Coast philanthropist. The archives, with more than 8,000 garments and accessories, is one of the largest fashion school archives in the nation.
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King's life outside of HCC was equally as vibrant. She was smitten by wanderlust and visited nearly 60 countries, collecting masks and costumes along the way. Her annual holiday letter, which detailed her travels, always came in the mail with a Mexican tin ornament. I have about 10 that I use each year to decorate my Christmas tree.
When I was scouting for a location for a spring fashion shoot, King allowed me to use her spectacular modern-style house in Memorial that she shared with her husband, George. Her home reflected a nomadic spirit, and her masks and costumes decorated the walls. But the house flooded one too many times, and King and her husband eventually moved.
She retired from HCC in 2011. After her husband died a decade later, King relocated to Seattle to be close to her son, Collin, daughter-in-law Stephanie, and granddaughter, Violet.
Chapman said he would send her care packages of her favorite chocolates and Issey Miyake scarves, one of her many fashion staples. "She would always tell me, 'You don't have to do this, but I'm always happy that you do,'" Chapman said.
When I speak of my favorite assignment, I think people expect me to share something wild about a celebrity or a big-name designer. I save those stories for school career days. But the mohair story and others like it are part of my storytelling scrapbook that I pull out on days when I need inspiration.
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I have Kay King to thank for that.
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