Patricia Ziegler

So I went home and took two shirts apart and put them together to make a four-pocket safari dress.

And some other ones, I took off the epaulettes and made a waistband, took off the arms.

I said, doing our part for disarmament here.

And we made a skirt.

And so Mel said, oh, we've got a business and found a store that was 400 square feet.

I started cutting up jackets and sleeping bags and we started dyeing things.

And also we'd sell like gas mask bags that didn't have any gas masks in them anymore, but they made great purses.

It was just a matter of looking at things in a fresh way.

Banana Republic.

As soon as we decided to have a store, we said, OK, well, what are we going to call this?

And Mel just intuitively just said, oh, it's Banana Republic because it's struggling young countries that want to sell bananas.

the surplus from the last dictator.

I mean, it was very uncool to say this, very unwoke, you know, but at that time we were having so much fun with it and we weren't politically correct at all.

We were an artist and a writer.

We weren't business people.