Dapper in the air and backstage at the catwalk
For more than 30 years, Lenny Matuszewski has produced some of Houston’s most noted fashion shows.
But when he slips on his United Airlines flightattendant uniform, Matuszewski, who owns Matuszewski Productions with business partner Tamara Klosz Bonar, works on a different stage.
There are no decisions about designer clothes or how they should look on the runway. It’s all about caring for customers, some of whom may never see a couture fashion show.
“I’ve been flying for so long, 40 years, that I can pick the trips I want to take, and those are usually to Central America,” Matuszewski said. “I only work in coach, so many of the passengers are poor and salt-of-the-earth people who often are just trying to get to their families. It gives me a tremendous sense of balance.”
It’s also the only time he wears that much polyester, Matuszewski joked.
He credits his long success on the runway and in the air to strong supportive family roots. His late father, Leonard Matuszewski Sr., worked in the oil industry, so the family lived in Abilene, New Orleans, Houston and Calgary, Canada.
His parents encouraged him to pursue his passion — tap and jazz dancing and theater — while exposing him to music greats such as Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole and Barbra Streisand. His father bought Matuszewski his first Streisand album, which is why he loves the award-winning singer today. And he spent his teens in New Orleans, where he discovered a love for dancing.
“In my life, it seems everything I’ve done has been connected to dance and theater in some way,” he said. “Elements of dance and theater often run through my fashion shows.”
Matuszewski said he often danced for money in the French Quarter because in New Orleans “it was OK for boys to dance, but in Houston, not so much. That’s when I was bullied and called a ‘sissy,’ so I stopped.”
His family, with five children, moved to Houston in the late 1960s, and Matuszewski was in the first graduating class at Stratford High School in 1975. With no real plan about what he wanted to do with his life after graduation, he took a job as delivery person for a travel agency while taking night classes at the University of Houston-Downtown.
He was fine with that life until a travel executive at the agency made a point: “Lenny, you can’t become a 40-year-old delivery boy. Why don’t you become a flight attendant?”
He got a job as a flight attendant for Texas International Airlines, which later merged into Continental Airlines, in the 1970s. About the same time, the 6-foot-2 Matuszewski, who had the grace of a dancer and poise of a model, started actually working as a fashion model.
Page Parkes, who has owned and operated her namesake agency for 40 years, signed him up for his first modeling classes. Neal Hamil, who founded and sold his namesake Houston modeling agency then went on to become a noted New York modeling agent, was his first agent.
“Back then, both Page and Neal worked together,” Matuszewski said. “Neal had a yellow Cadillac and would drive me to modeling castings. We were all kids together.”
He went on to model in Paris and Milan, working for Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis, Hugo Boss, Giorgio Armani and more. It was a glamourous life, sure, but it paid little — sometimes just enough to cover bread. So he took jobs at restaurants, such as the Hard Rock Cafe in London, to pay the bills.
He always was inquisitive about fashion shows and was the model who asked the most questions. That curiosity would help transition him into the next career, given that modeling often had a shelf life.
“I wanted to know why certain music was selected and how the lighting worked, not just why a certain shoe was picked for a look. It all goes back to my theater and dance background. I didn’t know then it was my master’s training for what I do now.”
He produced his first fashion show for El Matha Wilder, who owned Etui clothing boutique, for a Houston Police Department fundraiser in 1985. He was terrified he would bomb.
“I was so unsure of myself. I learned a big lesson that if El Matha believed in me, I had to believe in myself.”
After working for two decades as a fashion-show producer, Matuszewski teamed up with business partner and now best friend Bonar. The pair will celebrate 20 years in business this year.
“There’s always a great woman beside every man,” he said. “Tamara is that for me. She’s on my side, and we are so in sync, we complete each other’s sentences.”
Together, they produce about 60 fashion events, mostly fundraisers, and employ a team of 15 dressers and seamstresses and five fashion assistants.
“Eighty percent of my fashion shows are fundraisers for great causes,” Matuszewski said. “Some of them are fashion people who attend, but most of them want to be entertained. That’s how you reach them. You give them a show.”
Bonar, who had been working as a fashion-show producer on the East
Coast before she and her husband relocated to Houston, said she immediatedly connected with Matuszewski when she met him more than 20 years ago. “I’m so much about spirit and the right people coming into your life,” she said. “We were drawn to each other and had this shared experience of doing what we both love to do in the fashion world.”
Matuszewski produces and orchestrates the fashion show, determining the venue, lighting and logistical elements, and Bonar hires the models, picks the clothes and handles hair and makeup.
“We are not fashion people, but we are creative people who love fashion,” Bonar said. “We have such a great energy and an incredible team that make it so much fun.”
Given that the majority of the events they produce are related to charities, Bonar said it makes their work even more special.
“When you see the millions of dollars that a fashion show can raise, it’s a huge salute to this community. As long as there are charities doing great work and want fashion shows, we’ll keep doing them. It’s a way of giving back.”
At home in his Oak Forest neighborhood, Matuszewski’s life with his husband, Michael Bickham, and their rescue pup, Sammy, is relaxing and easy, another contrast from the glitz of the fashion world. Bickham handles operations for Matuszewski’s company. They love to travel, recently returning from a vacation in Japan, and they’ve seen Streisand in concert in cities across the globe at least a dozen times.
Three years ago, Matuszewski, who still has the 32-inch waist he had during his modeling days, had heart bypass surgery to repair a major blockage. The female surgeon who operated on him took great care to make the scar “look pretty,” he said.
That he survived the health scare is another blessing, Matuszewski said, much like his life in fashion and flight.
“Flying and modeling have been the best two things that have happened to me,” he said.