Babette Pinsky

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Babette Pinsky is an American clothing designer who created the Babette line of upscale women’s clothes. The clothes were designed in Oakland, California and sold in department stores, boutiques, and Babette shops across the United States. She ran the business with her husband, Steven Pinsky, until they closed it in 2016.

Pinsky was born in New York City to a French mother, who gave her the name Babette. She studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and moved to San Francisco in 1968 with her first husband, the year she started Babette. Steven joined the company in 1990.

In the early years, pleated fabrics came from a San Francisco factory, which the Pinskys bought in 1995. They later moved production to a larger factory in Oakland. The operation included a 25,000-square-foot space with about 10 seamstresses and workers, including master pleater Leung Tang from Hong Kong.

Babette’s clothes were sold in hundreds of stores and in Babette shops in cities such as San Francisco, New York, Chicago, San Jose, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, among others. By 2014 there were nine Babette stores.

Pinsky is best known for a distinctive accordion-like pleating style heat-pressed into microfiber fabrics. She worked with co-designer Josephine Tchang, and one garment could feature three different pleating styles. Fashion editor Sylvia Rubin credited Pinsky, along with Issey Miyake, with reinventing the Fortuny pleat in the 1980s. A notable design from that era is an intricately pleated, trapezoidal raincoat with a metallic sheen. In 2008 the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis held a special exhibit of Pinsky’s designs.