The Red Square clothing shop embodied a certain community-building, grassroots approach that was fundamental to the way Berkeley students approached problem solving in this era.
Co-owned by Liane Chu and People’s Park activist Michael Delacour — Chu’s boyfriend at the time — The Red Square started as a handmade dress shop frequented by Berkeley students and members of the community alike.
During her time as an undergraduate student, Liane had been working part- time for a dress shop when she realized that she was making eight dollars for each dress she made while the shop sold it for twelve. Shortly thereafter, she embraced the do-it-yourself ethic that was central to Cal student culture and started her own shop with her boyfriend Michael. For Liane and Michael, the shop became the center of their world: the place where they lived, ate, slept and sewed.
Liane described, in an interview, how she and Michael improvised the shop into existence:
“He found the building—the vacancy on Dwight Way right above Telegraph…. Rent was cheap, so we moved in and turned the apartment into our store. It was on the second floor and we changed the kitchen into a dressing room and put the sewing rooms in one of the bedrooms and had our bed that pulled out from under the sewing table, and we just lived in that little apartment! The kitchen was in the hallway. We made soups and stuff on our little camping stoves there and would add to the soup, vegetables and stuff every day until it was crawling out of the pot….That was the start of Red Square.”
During the three years of operation from 1966 to 1969, Liane often diligently turned out a dress a day, while sometimes constructing more elaborate embroidered pieces which took several days. The store also took items on consignment in order to get people from the Berkeley community more involved in the store.
Reflecting on the shop’s clientele, Liane remembered her average customer being “just the common Berkeley person who would be open to handmade clothes— something a little different.”