BOOK REPORT
THE FIRST LADY
OF
UNDERFASHIONS
AUTHOR: CHRISTINA ERTESZEK
2022 JANUARY ISSUE
Report by: Andrew Sia
The First Lady of Underfashions
By: Christina Erteszek www.christinaerteszek.com
Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and fine independent booksellers
Paperback at $17.69
I first heard about this rags to riches family memoir, The First Lady of Underfashions, from the author Christina Erteszek., As someone from this industry, I got back to her with enthusiasm. I agreed to feature this book report for the coming months. But due to my workload with the journal, this report has been deferred until now. I decided it published in our January issue.
I started reading it on a Sunday afternoon and I finished most part of it by midnight. “Awesome” is the best word I can find to describe it. I also came to realize that it is not easy to write a book review. But perhaps sharing of the experience can be more feasible to describe my present state of mind.
Christina is the youngest daughter of Jan and Olga Erteszek, the founders to the Olga Company. The book’s backdrop begins in Krakow, Poland, in 1933 when Jan and Olga met for the first time. But for the next several years, between 1935 to 1939, Jan traveled abroad, during where he spent some months in London studying at the Law Library of the British Museum in preparation for his doctoral thesis on “Crime in the Light of the Psychology”. He ended up graduating at the top of the class from the University of Copernicus and became the youngest Doctor of Law in Krakow. Though Jan suffered periodically from a childhood illness, he won the trust of Olga’s parents as a capable and charming young man. The two became engaged.
At that time, Germany spewed Nazism into Central Europe so Jan took-up residence with his cousin in Denmark as the Scandinavian countries were able to stabilize themselves. While in Copenhagen, Jan was able to obtain the visa from the Consulate General of the United States In 1938 Jan moved to New York to work as a “purveyor of fine imported meats”. Since the two of them weren’t married at the time, Olga was left behind with her parents in Krakow. In his absence, Jan encouraged Olga to learn well the trade of her mother, an industrious and talented corsetier.
Foretelling Hitler’s eminent threat of war on Poland, Jan returned to his homeland to marry Olga. However, three days before their planned wedding on Sunday, September 3, the Nazis took seize of Krakow. The young couple was tucked into a horse-drawn hay wagon and, after many unexpected situations as refugees, they ended up at the border between Germany and Russia.
In January 1940, they headed for Vilna, Lithuania, and obtained their exit visas for America. On the way, Jan continued to fool both the Russian and the German officers as a U.S. citizen with a Danish streetcar transfer as proof. But for a long time, they stayed in Russian occupied Lvóv and waited for a visa to take them to Los Angeles via Vilna, through Moscow, Vladivostok, Japan. It would take them a total of sixty-one days to make the long journey. When the time came, the couple left Lvóv separately and reunited again in San Francisco a year later.
In the U.S. Jan found very little use of his criminal law degree in Polish so he tried peddling encyclopedias and pots and pans door-to-door, while Olga worked as a seamstress and fit-model for the ABC Corset Company. But soon the young couple decided to sew a few garter-belts for the American women to hold-up the unsightliness of their stockings. Olga started by taking off the garter belt her mother made, copied the cut-pieces onto the newspaper, and used them to cut bits of laces and trims from the ten-dollar bill Jan auspiciously sited on the sidewalk near their walk-up apartment. The rest of their found fortune paid the five-dollars necessary to rent a sewing machine for three months. Jan then took the six styles of the garter belts Olga created and went for a meeting with Bullock’s Wilshire. The buyer wrote the first order for one-dozen garments. They discovered that if they could deliver before the twentieth of the month, they would be paid on the tenth of next month, which obviously helped their cashflow.
Soon orders started to come in. Two sewing machines were used with more helping hands, and they also moved to a place at the street corner, while listening on the radio about the development of the war in Europe. Large factories were required to use their machinery and manpower to serve the war purpose. They also discovered that there was a shortage of fabrics and materials throughout the country, but they believed they could hold on to what they were doing if they continued to assure the quality and beauty they devoted to their products.
“Olga Corsetry Company, Garter belts for Today” was set up in May of 1944, in a two-story brick structure, which they bought. And shortly afterwards, Olga gave birth to the first of three daughters, Victoria, named after the victory of war in Europe. From there the Olga Corsetry Company expanded into girdle business. In those days their employees were already participating in profit sharing, which wasn’t common especially for organizations in the 1940s.
By 1961, the company became Olga Company; Christina’s mother had already made the brand name Olga known throughout the nation long before then. An oval hangtag displaying Olga’s elegant face was affixed to each garment Sales began to expand everywhere in the United States and Olga joined the Market Week three times a year in New York City.
But when the pantyhose became popular in the 1960s, they immediately down-sized the girdle business. New innovative products, including panty briefs with stretch lace waistbands were introduced. The couple worked harder to maintain the same number of employees and avoided anyone in the company be out of work.
By the end of 1970s, Olga bras could be found in all the better stores across the nation. At the same time, the Olga Company claimed many innovations in almost every category of intimate apparel—shapewear, loungewear, daywear and sleepwear.
In 1978 Jan and Olga were invited to visit Wacoal in Japan. The Erteszek’s were impressed by Wacoal’s quality, manufacturing, and ethical treatment of their employees. Jan became immersed in Shintoism and its regard that beauty, truth, goodness, and morality are inseparable. At that time, Wacoal was looking for a partner in the United States. Wacoal offered the Olga the financing required to expand their now publicly traded company. Wacoal would also create opportunities for importing silk fabrics from Hong Kong and fine-gauzed embossed knits from Japan. After weighing all the pros and cons, the two companies formalized their partnership.
That same year Olga Erteszek took the slow lane; she started to have friends and spent her time between golf and volunteer work at the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Jan offered Christina to come work in the design department. As the youngest daughter, Christina had been feed on her mother’s sense of design and her father’s commitment to ethical business practices and ability to create new marketing opportunities. Initially Christina became the product manager in the 1980s as Jan Erteszek insisted that even members of the family would have to start from the bottom of the company.
Later, as the Olga brand wished to expand their market share to include a younger customer, the line named Olga’s Christina was born into the Olga Company. It was a way to exploit some of the talents the youngest daughter inherited from her mother and the mother/daughter duo would prove to be a winning marketing tool. Soon the first cotton-Lycra bra and panty line was introduced: contemporary underwear without lace but with an embroidery logo at the top corner of the right bra cup. Christina represented the new Baby Boomer generation who was more interested in comfort than constriction of structured underwear. At that time the department stores were flooded with nylon and laces giving Christina the ability to follow in her parents’ footstep by creating the first line collection of contemporary cotton intimates to the market. This was followed by many of the “blue sky” meetings Jan Erteszek lead for new products.
Both parents decided to retire in 1984, when Jan turned seventy and Olga sixty-seven years old. Jan’s choice for his successor was Christina’s husband, Howard Johnson Jr., the west coast sales manager for Dan River, an important textile mill in the United States which supplied most of millions of yards the Olga Company now consumed in nylon tricot fabrics. However, at this time, Howard had his own idea; he instead opened his own company and became an independent sales representative, and Olga was his biggest brand.
Unfortunately, the marriage between Olga Company and Wacoal became weary, and Jan went out to secure a loan and bought back the shares. The market came to know and soon Jan received several offers for the company from Warnaco.
In June 1984, Olga’s merging with Warnaco was made official. Jan and Olga were hoping to find the so-called right corporate parent for the employees while still being able to maintain the high quality of the products. At the beginning everything worked out fine, and Olga’s headquarters in Van Nuys welcomed two Warnaco division—White Stag and Speedo, whose design departments were from Portland, Oregon. Suddenly, the design skills, different machineries, fabric selections and fashion forecasters, were expanded and under the same roof.
The Olga Company continued to be known as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work for in America,” and it was even featured as the “30 Best Companies for Working Mothers”. One thing that was most impressive was that the workers in Olga were not called “employees” but associates. All these innovations reflected Jan’s intention to leave the world as a better place because of him.
At that point of time the Olga’s Christina label was projected to be 40% of the Olga business. This was enhanced by the introduction of the first inner/outer sports bra.
But while Warnaco was about to go private by its original owners, in the spring of 1986 an unknown investment group known as W Acquisition Group launched a takeover of Olga. Overnight the Olga Company, together with the rest of Warnaco, was swallowed-up in a hostile-takeover, led by Andrew Galef and Linda Wachner, who were backed by the notorious Michael Milken, known as the Junk Bond King.
From then on, Warnaco, along with their priced jewel, the Olga Company, spin out of control. All this was possible as Milken was known in his development of the market for the high-yield bonds. Milken would later be indicted for racketeering and securities fraud in 1989 in an inside trading investigation. I read from somewhere about Michael Milken that wasn’t mentioned in the book, and it went as the following:
“Milken was sentenced to ten years in prison and fined $600 million, and permanently barred from the securities industry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But his sentence was later reduced to two years for his cooperation with testimony against his former colleagues for good behavior. Milken was pardoned by President Trump on February 18, 2020. He has now become known for his philanthropy, and he has been funding research on cancer and other life-threatening diseases”.
What followed after the takeover was the massive layoff of staff, the first in the company’s history. Soon, on June 9, 1986, Jan died at the age of seventy-three. Olga’s death followed on September 15, 1989. And afterwards, Christina tendered her resignation.
Linda Wachner was known for her dedication to earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), which perhaps was what the stockholders would normally look for. She took the highest paycheck as an executive in her time, more than $158 million in salary, bonuses, dividends and special stock deals. She also took the prestigious brands to discount retail outlets at a very low price point. She was ousted in 2001.
A final personal comment:
The First Lady of Underfashions is told through the lens of daughter, Christina. The story begins with a promise she made in1986 to her dying father to write the story of his and Olga’s life and the principles they practiced, creating an award-winning enterprise. The author focuses more on her father, Jan Erteszek, and the Olga brand as his brainchild. Christina writes so fondly about her father, and a very large part of the book comes across as a biography of Jan Erteszek. Olga, the mother, seems more in the background, almost as a tool for Jan Erteszek’s creation. I was most impressed to read about how Jan thought about his employees. Perhaps I should make my correction here by calling them “associates”.
Warnaco, in the hands of its original founders, could have been a good match as the “parent” to trust for the company the Erteszeks founded. This intention was shattered when it caught the attention of the corporate raiders; the most notorious one during the time was Michael Milken.
The story shows the greed and powerplay in the American corporations, and Warnaco was only one example of a great company that was gobbled-up in unethical financial schemes. We should also learn that in this kind of takeover very often ended up with no winners but only losers. History has been repeating itself.
For someone like Jan Erteszek, whose business standard was so high, who started as an immigrant, and who focused on the world to be a better place, he became disappointed. Sadly, Mr. Erteszek left the world in a regretful state of mind.
The Olga line of products is now part of the Heritage brands at PVH (Philp Van Heusen), a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Olga by Warners label now focuses on full-figure bras and a limited collection of panties. Christina explains she is grateful for the support her book has received from PVH and the Heritage Brand and is happy to understand PVH emphasis on corporate responsibility.