Designer Creates Fashions to Benefit Nursing Mothers
“Clothes for nursing mothers? It’s hard enough to find fashionable maternity clothes!” lamented one decidedly pregnant young woman.
Had she been reading such magazines as Maternity Matters and the Wet Set Gazette, however, she’d have indeed found a mail order ad for fashionable clothes offering a minimum of fuss and embarrassment to the nursing mother and those around her.
The designer is Alice Walli of Villa Park; her line, which includes eight styles, is called the Holly Nicholas Nursing Collection.
Some have buttons. Some have pleats. All allow for discreet breast-feeding in public.
“Most people think I’m making nurses’ uniforms,” Walli admitted. “I’m not, of course.”
Walli wouldn’t have much reason to make nurses’ uniforms. But she has at least two reasons for designing the Holly Nicholas Collection.
“This is Holly,” she said, proudly pointing to a photograph, “and this is Nicholas, my first two grandchildren. Three years ago, my daughter and daughter-in-law both had babies.”
A career also was born.
“I had sewn all my life. I had modeled,” she recalled. “I knew about fabric and style. So I made a dress for the new mothers. Then a friend said, ‘Why don’t you sell them?’ Well, I’d had three elementary business classes, but I had no experience in the manufacturing business at all.
“I found a woman who had a power sewing machine, but she soon told me I’d have to make larger quantities or I wouldn’t get anywhere. I went to buy my garment labels in Los Angeles. The label manufacturer said what I needed was a resident buyer. Of course, I didn’t know what that was. So I met one. She got on the telephone, called these other two people--to this day I don’t know what they do. I took over my samples; they figured how much it would cost to have them made . . . .
“I sold about $3,000 worth that first fall, wholesale to shops, retail to customers. Last year I sold more. This year, sales were twice what they were last year.”
Sales are creeping slowly upward, Walli believes, because women are more and more willing to nurse in public. She hasn’t forgotten the hullabaloo caused the year before last when a nursing mother was asked to leave the posh Beverly Rodeo Hotel’s Cafe Rodeo. (Feminist attorney Gloria Allred filed a $60,000 suit on behalf of the woman.) But Walli feels it’s a matter of degrees.
“I think my daughter would nurse in a casual place like Marie Callender,” Walli said. “At a place like Chez Cary, I would prefer she doesn’t. But I tell you, these clothes are so discreet. . . .”
Most of Walli’s customers come to her by word of mouth or through advertisements in magazines and hospital publications. The dresses are available through only a few retail outlets.
“The shops say they can’t sell them; my customers say they can’t find them,” Walli said. “It’s a bit of a mystery.”
Walli offers two small Holly Nicholas collections a year, one using cooler fabrics, the other warmer. Prices range from $18 to $50.
For fall/winter, she offered a sailor-collared dress (typical for maternity wear) with concealed openings and a classically tailored blouse with easy-open buttons on either side; the spring/summer line includes an attractive drop-waist sun dress with vertical tucks.
Both collections feature a matching sleeveless nightdress and peignoir and a “transition dress” designed for all phases of pregnancy and maternity. “It can be worn all nine months,” explained Walli. “Afterward you can put a belt on it.”
Walli feels there’s a definite need for nursing fashions.
“I hear it from women all the time,” she said. “I can think of two right off the bat, both of whom had to get totally undressed in order to nurse their babies.
“One woman got to Nordstrom and thought surely she could shop for two hours without nursing her baby. Well, baby got hungry, she wasn’t wearing anything that buttoned down the front, so she had to go into the toilet stall and take off her dress.
“Another had been to a dinner party; she’d taken her baby along--same thing. On top of that, she said she had to ask some stranger to hold baby while she put her dress back on.”
The benefits for Walli, 56, have not been only financial: Walli’s four children are grown; she and her husband are the sole occupants of a large home in Villa Park.
“I’m so lucky to have fallen into this,” she said. “I don’t have any of that ‘empty nest syndrome,’ you know?”
