Designs for Not-So-Perfect Figures : Jill Richards Line Copes With Size and Shape Variables
Jill Richards is neither tall nor long-waisted. But when she designed her first collection 16 years ago, she made Hollywood-glamorous gowns only a model could wear.
“I was doing all the things I would have liked to have worn,” the tiny, L.A.-based designer recalls. She soon learned her customers were not “those wonderful, tall models”--but women with as many figure complaints as herself.
Clients Reassured
She adjusted her line accordingly--and found, by chance, that clients were reassured by her own non-model proportions.
“Many times ladies will come in and say: ‘You’re little! I’m so glad. You can design for me,’ ” says Richards, who recently showed her holiday collection at Nordstrom Westside Pavilion.
“You’re not designing from a vacuum,” she adds. “You learn there’s a customer out there who has certain needs and wants--and if you don’t fill them, someone else will.”
Richards says the most frequent figure worries center on a thick waist, wide hips or unattractive arms--shortcomings she tries to address through her collections.
Her latest holiday separates and evening dresses (aimed at 30- to 50-year-olds and priced from about $400 to $1,000) include drop-waist ball gowns that camouflage the middle; chiffon handkerchief skirts that glide past hips and thighs and a variety of fashion devices for less-than-perfect forms.
Curiously, Richards makes dresses that are either very bare or very covered up. Women want one or the other, she says, but nothing in between. She chose both shiny and matte surfaces, including sequins, crinkly lames, lace and jerseys--sometimes mixing them for textural play.
A former actress, Richards says she gained her fashion vantage from working in films.
Screen Dressing
“When dressing someone for the screen,” she says, “you may drop a little bit of what’s happening in fashion to flatter your lady.
“I use a lot of white close to the face. It reflects light like the ‘key light’ they give you on the set.” Richards also forgoes layering or short hemlines. And she doesn’t like to overwhelm a woman with dresses that are “glitzed out.”
“I look sometimes at gorgeous fabrics and I’m tempted,” Richards says. “I have to think: ‘Do I want to make a dress out of that or frame it on the wall?’ ”
