Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Alyce Parsons' clothes closet could be mistaken for the laboratory of an image consultant.

Pyramid Power

Alyce Parsons promotes a stylish ascent to find 'bliss' at the peak

By Mary Ann Cook

Alyce Parsons is a woman with a mission, an image consultant with a metaphysical bent who wants the outer you to reflect the inner you. Parsons is an author/speaker/teacher who has given presentations and trained other style-makers all over the world.

She taught at West Valley College for 10 years and helped create that school's Personal Image Program. Today she is president of Universal Style, her own image consulting business, and is co-director of an academy that trains others in the field.

"This is my passion, what I'm on earth to do," Parsons says, "to express my feelings of who people are and how they want to express themselves. Clothing is, after all, the main nonverbal vehicle we use to tell people who we are."

The role of image consulting has undergone some sea changes during the 17 years she's been practicing. These days there's even a spiritual component to image consulting, a soul-searching endeavor whereby you discover what gives life meaning for you. The idea is to establish an integration between the inner and the outer you. Look inward to discover what you want to look like on the outside. Parsons calls it "inner essence, outer expression."

Where once fashion decreed choosing clothes according to coloration and body type, today it focuses on the whole package--personality and lifestyle. The key is to "follow your bliss," as Parsons puts it, to know what you feel good wearing. That way, your clothes will be a reflection of your entire personality: you'll create your individual style.

Image-making the Parsons way is part metaphysics, part psychiatric, part art design. Instead of being a slave to fashion, her clients and students are out to conquer the beast.

"Her classes are so uplifting," says Clareen Dunivin, an instructor at the Los Gatos Healing Center(also known as the Miracle Resource Center), who has taken classes from Parsons at West Valley and attended a recent workshop. "She has a unique and exciting way of blending her 'spirit journal' with her system of style. She shows us how to express ourselves with the way we dress, to translate our periods of joy, our high points, into what we put on the outside."

The workshop she's citing was called Pyramid of Purpose, a fundraiser for the Miracle Resource Center, which is part of the healing center. The workshop incorporated Parson's emphasis on journal writing with her seven categories of style. The categories are sporty, traditional, elegant, feminine, alluring, creative and dramatic. These divisions can hold true for decorating a house or defining a country, as well as helping a client find his or her combination.

"The journal writing is designed to get in touch with your inner self, the method I find the most useful." Parsons herself has kept a personal journal since she was 28 and recently reread it. The patterns she found in her own life were learning and communication.

If the interior message doesn't agree with the exterior, you're not being true to yourself and you won't quite jibe. Princess Diana, for example, had a feminine style as part of her persona, but Nancy Reagan would have a hard sell trying to convince us she's a nurturing sort simply by wearing pink.

Parsons labels herself a combination of dramatic, elegant and alluring in the lexicon of image consulting. Let's take a look through her wardrobe, "my favorite room," she jokes, in her newly remodeled house.

The closet is the size of a small tract bedroom. In the center is an island, for ease in packing suitcases, since the Parsonses are inveterate travelers. Beneath the island are drawers filled with leotards, scarves and lingerie, all positioned by color.

One wall holds sportswear, a testament to her regular workouts at Courtside; the next wall is separates, and the third displays business wear, more formal. Separates are the standard throughout. The few dresses she has are more like suits: They inevitably have a jacket.

Four slideout drawers harbor shoes, and each drawer holds eight pairs. If it's winter, those shoes occupy the upper drawers and summer ones the lower. Rods slide out to reveal accessories such as belts. Her husband's clothes occupy the fourth wall.

"People think it's expensive to dress well, but it doesn't have to be if you buy classics." The items in Parsons' closet could have been worn with aplomb for the past 10 years or more and will safely sail into the millennium with her.

How did a dairy farmer's daughter from Modesto become a fashion guru for people all over the world? The evolution was a gradual one, but it started when her daughter, 12, decided she wanted to become a model. Parsons enrolled her in a modeling school, and when the school wanted some adult models, Parsons was tapped and began her own trip down the fashion runway.

From that vantage, she started the first San Jose Junior League fashion show and also headed fashion shows for the Dental Auxiliary, where she was an officer for many years. Those stints led to working in retail at Henri's in Valley Fair and for Canterbury House in Los Gatos, both now defunct.

Then she began to take courses in fashion and design at West Valley College and worked for three different design firms in the Los Gatos area. Five years after she took classes at West Valley, she was teaching them. From her experiences in teaching came her books, What's My Style? and Universal Style: Dress for Who You Are and What You Want. There are two versions of the latter: one for women, one directed at men.

The books are used in colleges around the country, including Parsons School of Design in New York. She helped set up the fashion program at Saddlebrook College, still in existence. But the funds for the West Valley program dried up, and Parsons moved on to found her own businesses.

One is the Academy of Appearance Design on Los Gatos Boulevard near Highway 9. There are two other directors of the academy, Corolyn Lundell and Sharon Chrisman. They can deploy a staff of 20. The program trains image consultants and is tailored to the individual.

"Alyce is such a dynamic woman, bringing her own ideas to the forefront. She's innovative in looking at fashion and style without surrendering to it," says Angie Congdon, who teaches at the academy and has her own business in color consulting.

Parsons' main concentration these days is giving talks and workshops to large groups through her own company, Universal Style. She's appeared on TV and would like to expand that aspect of spreading her message--that how you look outside is an extension of how you feel about yourself inside, spreading the gospel of the total package.

She's active in the Miracle Resource Center, and its director, Philip Kavanaugh, says about her: "Her book has inspired me to be more daring and creative in my dress, to express myself in different ways using clothing. She's transformed my wardrobe and ruined my clothing budget."

Parsons is proud of having helped found an international association of image consultants to establish and maintain standards within the industry. In the early days almost anyone could proclaim herself or himself a fashion expert and hold forth. Now the Association of Image Consultants International acts as a conscience, monitors members and standards. She was its second president, the first to preside when the east section merged with the west.

"I'm always learning, always taking classes," she says. She has a degree in English from the College of Holy Names in Oakland and is a few units short of a master's degree. She taught English until her family arrived, a daughter and a son. Her husband is a periodontist who retired at the age of 45, weary of causing pain, even necessary, prophylactic pain.

Now he manages their property and is an avid golfer, gardener, outdoorsman. She's just the opposite, but they communicate well, have respect for each other, Alyce says, citing those qualities in particular as helpful in maintaining a marriage. The Parsonses were high school sweethearts in Modesto.

Alyce Parsons grew up on a dairy ranch, loves country music and goes to the Saddle Rack, a far cry from organizing fashion shows at Nordstrom and helping other image-conscious businesses, such as the Koll Corporation, outfit and train their employees.

She's the oldest of four children, and she excelled in her schoolwork. "When school was out every summer I'd cry," she says. "Then I'd march down to the library, pick up five books and repeat that pattern every week through the summer. I grew up in a patriarchy, tightly bound to the ranch, couldn't date till I was 17, but was allowed to say whatever I wanted.

"Then I married a man who required me to be independent, autonomous. That's part of the reason I have my own business today."

The Parsonses are new grandparents, thanks to Mike and Ann Parsons, both attorneys who live in Los Gatos. And daughter Susan Parsons Hensley is expecting, so the legacy continues. Susan is a TV anchor in Lexington, Ky.

Parsons likes to cite the biblical parable of the talents (that culture's name for money), where one son buries his, one uses his up and the other increases his threefold. "I like to think I'm like the third son.

"We all have gifts, and it's up to us to find out what those gifts are and use them for the benefit of others. Such knowledge increases our self-esteem. Let's reclaim the gifts of age, of cultural diversity, of women," she urges. She preaches that gospel in her books, her speeches and workshops, as well as in private consultations. "After all," she says, "that's the essence of this country, when it shows its very best face."

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