Meet Nome Obermeyer, the Most Influential Designer You've Never Heard Of

Over the decades, Nome Obermeyer has been guiding the design of the iconic skiwear brand—always content to be playing a backstage role.

Nome Obermeyer has been designing the brand’s skiwear for nearly 60 years. PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

Google "Nome Obermeyer," and the only substantive reference that comes up is a short article in The Skier Scribbler—Aspen High School’s student newspaper. Despite the internet void, the matriarch of the Obermeyer dynasty has been quietly but instrumentally influencing the brand from behind the scenes for more than half a century. She modeled the looks in the 1960s and 1970s and soon became the brand’s fashion-savvy apparel designer.

“Those were my Sohler Blue Bird skis. They made me fast! For the sweater, I did a few rows of rib knit and different bumps to show [the Austrian manufacturer] to see if they could replicate it on the machine. Those little bumps gave me a little bit of a thermal thing.” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

Klaus Obermeyer, the man who founded the iconic eponymous skiwear brand in 1947, is a legend in the ski world. Undoubtedly, you’ve heard the story about how he crafted Obermeyer’s first down parka out of a comforter his mom gave him when he traveled from Germany to the U.S. He is larger than life. But why is so little known about Nome, who married Klaus in 1965? She sketched the designs for sweaters, pushed Klaus to jettison knickers in favor of stretch pants and conceived the brand’s iGrow system to allow sleeves and pant legs to lengthen as kids grew. Nome’s designs—and her outlook on life—were influenced by her Aunt Kat, who you’ll know better as four-time Oscar-winning actress Katharine Hepburn. Today, Nome and Klaus live on an 80-acre ranch in Emma, Colorado. She still works from home, commuting to Obermeyer’s Aspen headquarters to work with the brand’s design team as needed.

Margaret Hepburn Obermeyer, who goes by Nome, was born in Maryland’s Bethesda Naval Hospital during World War II. Her father, Thomas McFaul Perry, worked in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism developing the proximity fuze, a bomb that detonated above the ground rather than on impact. It was an innovation that helped to end the war. In Munich, the bomb flattened an entire quadrangle of multi-story apartment buildings where, coincidentally, Klaus had been living during the war. The bomb dropped shortly after Klaus had left the city. The families wouldn’t connect the dots until years later. “My dad came out to Aspen, and he would have been speaking about the war with Klaus,” Nome says. “Klaus is an engineer, and my father was an engineer, an inventor and a physicist. They would have had a lot to talk about.”

“This is in Oberstdorf, Germany. We’d be driving around, Klaus would see something and we’d stop [to take a photo].” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

After the war, her family moved to a rural farm on 120 acres in northwest Connecticut. They lived in an 1840s stone house, initially without running water, central heating or electricity. “We grew our own food, butchered our meat and made our own bread,” says Nome, who would climb the hill on the farm with her twin brother, Tom, and ski back down through the woods.

In the early 1960s, Nome attended the University of New Mexico, studying biology, geology and archaeology. She was making her way back east in her 1962 Triumph TR3 roadster (white with navy blue interior) when she decided to stop in Aspen to earn some money. “Aspen had a certain pull at that time,” she says. She worked on a construction crew with her brother, Tom, doing rough carpentry. “I came from a family of women where if you want to do something, you do it,” Nome says. She also worked as a waitress, serving breakfast at the Hotel Jerome. That’s where she met Klaus. “He was so sweet and funny. You could just feel the radiant good energy,” she says. “And he was the only one I’d met who knew the Latin names of the flowers and the birds.” Klaus was 44; Nome was 22. “Age doesn’t matter. It didn’t to me, anyway. What mattered was his life force,” she says.

Nome designed a navy and white sweater with red stars at the shoulders. “It did remarkably well.” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

Nome never left Aspen. She believed fiercely in Klaus’s idea for the company—to make products to get families into nature in winter. “Klaus was trying to get people to understand how glorious skiing is,” she says, “that getting on snow can be a transformative experience.” As partners in business, they each brought something to the table. Klaus was an engineer who was good with people, finances and factories. Nome saw the possibilities in design and marketing.

“I was furious about that picture [taken at their ranch near Aspen]. Klaus woke me up early, and I wasn’t even able to brush my hair,” Nome says. “The pant was a wonderful ski jean. It was the Wayne Wong era.” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

Back then, and for the next 50 some years, Nome worked quietly and diligently in the shadows. “Why would I want to confuse the concept of what Obermeyer is by fluttering around?” she says. “Klaus is the personality. I wasn’t interested in being in the foreground. I came from a principled family of people who didn’t show off—but who got a lot of work done.”

“I was sitting, perilously balanced, in a hotel window in Zurs. Medico made that mock turtleneck for me with a pretty snowflake design at the neck. Photographer Remo Lavagnino, who did some catalog work for us, told Klaus, ‘Use that one. That’s a great drumstick.’” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

At the time, Obermeyer had products like Arlberg straps, Bavarian quilted jackets, wool sweaters, Sportana sunscreen and a Garmisch ski boot. Klaus had a price list but no catalog to market it all. “I had worked in an offset printing place in Albuquerque, so I knew how to lay out a page,” Nome says. She photographed and designed the1964-65 catalog, the brand’s first ever. In 1964, she flew to Zurich to meet Klaus’s family. “I was sitting very quietly because I didn’t speak German, and I just started doing these tiny little sketches,” she says. “Klaus looked over and said, ‘Oh, that’s a good design. We ought to do that.’ He handed it off to the floor manager [at the factory], who got it knit that same day.” The sweater, with small red stars at the shoulder, sold like hotcakes.

“In the beginning, it was always Klaus taking the pictures with me in them. I was the cheapest model! This sweater had red-and-white stripes; the goggles were Carrera. I had orangutan arms!” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

On June 25, 1965, Nome and Klaus got married. “Klaus is not a confrontational person. He saw too much of it in the war,” Nome says. “I am not that way. I’m a fighter. It was a good combination of this wonderful human being who loves life, who’s radiantly happy, and a person who’s supporting that in the background.”

Nome was always driving design. In the early 1960s, the Obermeyer look was all about corduroy knickers paired with wool socks. “Klaus had a European sensibility, and I had a New England sensibility,” she says. The knickers and socks worked well if you were walking uphill and skiing down. But on a ski lift, they’d bind at the back of the knee. “The women in my family wore pants,” she says, “so I understood how comfortable they could be.” She wanted a pant that was comfortable but also warm and flattering. “As the model, I wore the knickers for a while, but then I refused to wear them,” she says. Nome patterned an in-the-boot stretch ski pant in high-quality wool that quickly became a staple in the Obermeyer line.

“That’s a Geiger sweater with boiled wool and silver buttons. We were at the Killington warehouse.” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

After Klaus Jr. was born in 1968, Nome came up with the idea for iGrow, a system that allowed children’s clothing to grow with the child by sewing an interior tuck in the garment’s insulation and lining—and letting it out later when more length was needed. While railroad workers used to wear blue-and-white hickory striped bib overalls with adjustable suspenders, she says, there wasn’t any insulated clothing that was adjustable.

In 1970, the iGrow system was launched. It’s still in the line today.

“This was the first kids’ line. Klausi’s wool sweater was imported from Italy. My sweater is a fully fashioned raglan with a seamless, graceful body shape.” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

Nome is pragmatic about her involvement with the brand. “Klaus had a job to do, and I knew I could help him do it,” she says. “Women recognize value and work to support what they think is worthwhile.” But if for one moment you think Nome is a shrinking violet simply standing behind her man, think again. She has always been opinionated and passionate about doing what’s right. Back in the 1960s, when she was working at the Hotel Jerome, there was a particular customer who regularly harassed the waitresses. “He’d hit on the girls; he was virulently unpleasant,” Nome says. “Nobody was going to do anything. They were just suffering it.” So, she heated up a pot of coffee to refill his cup. “I missed, and it spilled down the front of his pants.” Nome was fired, but the harassment? It stopped.

Nome attributes her strength of character to her upbringing. Her grandmother, Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn, was a determined suffragist in the early 1900s, campaigning for a woman’s right to vote. She also founded the American Birth Control League along with Margaret Sanger. Nome’s grandfather, Thomas Norval Hepburn, was a urologist and surgeon who believed in a sound mind and body. “Every morning, he would line the kids up like a little organ pipe, and they had to submerge in a bathtub of ice-cold water,” Nome says. “It was good for your circulation.”

“This was Klaus’s classic look: knickers and pretty patterned socks.” The wool sweater was made by Stapf in Austria, the boots were Garmisch and the car was Klaus’s Jaguar. PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

Her mother, Margaret “Peg” Hepburn Perry, went to Bennington College and, for more than 50 years, worked as a librarian. “I was also very lucky to have a fascinating, adventurous, life-loving aunt,” Nome says. In her wardrobe, Katharine Hepburn wore mostly khaki, red, white and black. “She had figured out that red could be a foil for other colors,” Nome says of her Aunt Kat. “Most of the reds in the ski industry had more blue and black in them, like the color of the flag.” They weren’t as luminous as the red that Hepburn favored, which had more vermilion in it. Hepburn’s red would become a signature color in the Obermeyer line.

Hepburn’s fashion aesthetic also informed Nome’s design sensibilities. “Aunt Kat knew about framing the face. She had beautiful shoulders,” says Nome, who designed silhouettes to drape from a fairly straight shoulder. Nome’s Aunt Kat helped her understand, especially for women, the importance of projecting who you are—or who you’re trying to become—and how clothing can make that kind of difference. “It can be the armor that gives you courage,” Nome says.

“Klaus said I could have four colors: navy, purple, blue, and this coral was my wild card.” PHOTO COURTESY OF OBERMEYER

Beyond the color and the design cues, Hepburn impressed upon the Obermeyer matriarch a life perspective that has guided Nome over the decades. “If she taught me anything, it’s to hell with what anybody else thinks.”