Fuchs, Valerie

Biography

"Valerie Weil was raised in a well-to-do Jewish family in eastern Czechoslovakia where her father owned a department store in Turciansky Svaty Martin. She and her husband, Leslie Fuchs, a dentist, married quietly in 1938 under the shadow of Nazism. Their families were sent to concentration camps, but Leslie’s profession was needed by the Germans so the couple was sent to Povazska Bystrica, near Bratislava. A sympathetic assistant to the town mayor warned them when the situation with the Germans worsened. The couple were first hidden in an attic in a villa. During this time, Valerie created very complex ‘mathematical’ drawings in pencil on small pieces of graph paper during the long days when the other tenants played cards. Another scare sent the Fuchs to a crawl space used to store wood, and they were saved from having to winter there by an invitation from another Jewish man to share the attic of a nearby house where they hid for eight months. Throughout the ordeal, Valerie saved her tiny drawings. After immigrating to the United States, Valerie Fuchs was given a scholarship at the Fashion Institute of Technology on the strength of her drawing talent. Upon graduation, she was hired to be a textile designer at Pacific Mills, and designed gloves on the side. Lari Stanton of Aris gloves first bought her designs and then made sure she worked for him exclusively. She created a drawing of a young goat that became the company logo. Printed in both black and brown, it was die cut and placed inside the gloves to emphasize they were made of French kid leather (at first, in the early 1960s, the gloves were made in France, later in the Philippines)." -From an appraisal by aGatherin' written in 2014.

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