January 2024

The unpublished memoir of San Nicholas reveals the tortured childhood he overcame to become a renowned Carnival costume designer.

– by Frank Perez

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the late San Nicholas’ birth and New Orleans will celebrate the legendary costume designer with an extraordinary dual tribute.  

On February 1, Le Petit Theatre will host a one-time concert performance of San, an original Broadway-style musical about Nicholas’s life, followed by the private opening of a new Presbytere exhibit, “To Be A Star: The Carnival Costume Designs of San Nicholas.”

Nicholas designed costumes for over 60 years for a long list of Mardi Gras krewes, namely Endymion, Zulu, Orpheus, Thoth, Pete-Fountain’s Half-Fast Walking Club and many others that are now defunct. According to Louisiana State Museum Carnival curator Wayne Phillips, Nicholas “was one of the most talented costume designers to work in Carnival.”

Rocky Russo, a close friend of Nicholas and the executor of his estate, has made available an enormous collection of Nicholas’ remaining costume sketches to the Louisiana State Museum as the foundation for a landmark exhibition in the Presbytere on Jackson Square. The exhibition will include some of Nicholas’ most extraordinary designs and original costumes from the Museum’s permanent collection, representing several krewes.

Calvin Antino San Nicholas was born in New Orleans in 1924 and grew up in the French Quarter in the 1920s and 1930s. It was not a happy childhood. The family lived in extreme poverty in a run-down tenement with no electricity. During the Depression, food was a luxury. To make matters worse, Nicholas’ father was incredibly abusive and often drunk. Nicholas was told repeatedly he was, “ugly, deformed, and disgusting looking.”

In an unpublished memoir, Nicholas recalls a memory from when he was six years old, “[My father] sat me there forcing me to drink alcohol. All the men in the bar would laugh … he made me drink until I could no longer stand. He would then put me in a doorway or bring me to a park and make my mother try and find me. It was frightening.” 

To escape the horror of his upbringing, Nicholas turned to art. As a child, his artistic talent was discovered by his school teachers, although his father cruelly mocked him for it. Still, he pursued his education aggressively, hoping that his skills would lead to a career and independence. 

As a teenager, the boy attended pre-vocational school and night classes at the influential John McCrady School of Art on Bourbon Street, run by McCrady, one of the city’s most esteemed artists, and his wife, Mary. McCrady and the school’s teachers saw promise in the young artist and allowed him to practice fashion illustration in his drawing classes.

Nicholas first found work in the fashion industry at D. H. Holmes Department Store, then one of the city’s oldest and largest retailers. Stores like D. H. Holmes were fertile proving grounds for young designers and artists looking to refine their skills by drawing illustrations for newspaper advertisements and designing elaborate merchandise displays.

After moving to New York as a teenager, Nicholas enrolled at Traphagen School of Fashion, a pioneering design school founded by Ethel Traphagen in 1923. Noted designers such as Anne Klein and Louisiana-born Geoffrey Beene were Traphagen alumni. The school’s design program encouraged students to study costumes of worldwide cultures. Nicholas also found inspiration in the traditional attire worn by the school’s international students.  

After returning to New Orleans in the 1950s, Nicholas initially took work during Carnival preparing costumes for float riders. 

“I finally found a job cutting Mardi Gras costumes, not the beautiful extravagant ones, but just the krewe costumes. These were the costumes the float riders wore. These had to be made cheaply. This tested my knowledge because they were not my designs. They were very amateurish.”  

Nicholas’ big break came when legendary burlesque performer Lilly “Cat Girl” Christine, who headlined Louis Prima’s 500 Club, noticed his work and began introducing him around. Nicholas writes, “She loved my designs and became very friendly. I would make her costumes.” When the “Cat Girl” went to New York to star in a Broadway production, Nicholas created her costume, one that helped her become a national sensation.

This recognition led Nicholas to be hired to design his first ball costumes, for the Krewe of Alpheus. He recalls:

“The Ball was sensational. They had never seen anything like it before. Since I had never seen a ball before, this was a big plus for me. I made original costumes, and the presentation was flawless. I couldn’t believe it. So many other requests came in and I became sort of an overnight designer of Mardi Gras costumes. What a great feeling that this was happening to me.”

In Carnival, Nicholas had found the approval his abusive father had denied him. As a child he was starving for affirmation, as a costume designer he found an abundance of it – and became a star. 

Nicholas would go on to design for many other krewes, and throughout his illustrative career, he accumulated hundreds of stories and anecdotes. He writes:

“One funny story was one of a prominent lady who was queen of this particular ball. She was to enter the floor in a horse-drawn carriage. She wore an Antebellum gown. The horse decided to relieve himself in the middle of the floor. If this wasn’t funny enough, her escort assisted her out of the carriage in the horse’s delivery. The people attending were hysterical, but she remained calm and waived her scepter to the audience very gracefully as if nothing happened.”

No krewe was as central to the designer’s career and influence as the Krewe of Endymion, founded in 1966 by Ed Muniz. Endymion staged its first parade in New Orleans’s Gentilly neighborhood in 1967.

When Muniz recruited Nicholas to design the krewe’s costumes from its first ball and parade, the artist had connected with a client who valued his boundless imagination. Nicholas also joined the krewe as one of its founding members.

As the krewe’s ambitions grew, the size of Nicholas’ costumes grew as well, incorporating huge backpieces carried by their wearers on their shoulders. The expansive size of the backpieces provided a perfect canvas for flamboyant designs, often executed as sequined figures mounted in relief. The exposed wirework on the back is filled in with hundreds of brightly colored ostrich plumes.

Mardi Gras historian Arther Hardy wrote, “He [Nicholas]  injected an element of fashion into his costumes that had rarely been seen before. Soon he was coordinating not only the costumes worn at Carnival balls but also the makeup, wigs and music, even the scenery and dances.”

Throughout his long career, Nicholas witnessed the evolution of Carnival in New Orleans. In 2009 he lamented, “Mardi Gras was different years ago … Now the work is gradually going to Hong Kong. This to me is a tragedy. Some importers are even putting upside down buckets on the heads of riders and calling them headpieces.”

In his private writings, the designer declared that “my constant desire to learn took me down many roads. That is why I think one should never stop learning.” His advice came from personal experience.  While in New York, in addition to his fashion studies, Nicho took classes in jewelry design. Later, back in New Orleans, he took classes in floral design and experimented with incorporating real flowers into his costumes. Even well into his seventies, the artist was still evolving:  He took up drawing classes at the New Orleans Academy of Art.

Before Nicholas died in 2018 at the age of 93, he met New York theater composers, Leo Fotos and David Gosz. The composers fell under his spell and got to know Nicholas extremely well.  The hundreds of stories from him about his colorful life inspired them to write a full Broadway-style musical about him.

Simply entitled San, the musical has already been performed several times in New York City in a concert format and has earned accolades in numerous theater festivals. Gosz and Fotos hope to take San to Broadway, sharing the perseverance and talent of one of New Orleans’s greatest artists with a national audience.

In conjunction with the Louisiana State Museum exhibition, a special one-time concert performance of San will take place at Le Petit Theatre on the same night as the exhibition opening. Phillips says the state museum is producing the musical rendition of Nicholas’s life. Afterward, the audience will second-line to the Presbytere for a private opening of the exhibition. The exhibit will be on display for the next two years.

Nicholas’ obituary states his “final wish was to positively affect the lives of young creatives trying to overcome adversity and hoped to accomplish that through the sharing of his life story.”