Artwork on Clothes Catches the Eyes of the Toddlers
Carey Krevoy, owner of a Brentwood gift store, tells the story of the union suit she gave a 2-year-old for Christmas. The child opened the box at a party, stripped off her clothes in front of everyone and put on the gift then and there.
“I’m told that happens often,” says Wendy Berg, owner/designer of Dressed to Dribble, whose union suit prompted the pint-size strip. “My clothes are happy. Children want to wear them to bed.”
One day at Splash, a Studio City shop, a chubby Size-4 child spied one of Berg’s yellow clown dresses. Shop owner Dale Edgecumbe says the girl stuffed herself into the Size-3 outfit and refused to remove it. Her agitated father had to buy the dress, because he couldn’t get his daughter to take it off.
Berg’s togs for infants and toddlers do seem different than standard kiddie clothes. The difference is not in garment design, which tends to be simple, but in the artwork Berg adds.
Primitive Drawings
Children can relate to her primitive, kindergarten-style drawings of dolls with curved lines for a mouth, angels with cartoon curls, houses made of geometric shapes, trains, moons, stars and clowns in pointed hats.
“It’s not an affectation,” Berg says of her artistic style, “that’s just how I draw.”
Her color combinations too are childlike. Pistachio, strawberry, chocolate, mixed perhaps with red and silver or gold glitter.
In fact, Berg, 24, says she recently quit an art class when the instructor said to mix only primary colors, that red and orange clash.
The L.A. designer, 5 feet tall and Size 2, is often mistaken for a child herself. When waiting to see buyers, she says, salespeople often approach her and coo, “Sweetie, if you see something you like, please let me know.”
Ask what any of her drawings signify, and Berg answers: “Nothing” with the existential authority of a UCLA philosophy major, which she was in 1983, when her Dressed to Dribble business began.
That was the year she used laundry markers to paint three houses on a baby’s white undershirt as a gift. Friends told her she ought to sell her talents, so she painted a creeper and walked into a Beverly Glen shop; the store ordered three dozen of the style.
By the time Berg graduated UCLA one year later, she had designed her first full line. By her second season, she had progressed to silk-screen outlines of her drawings, but continued to hand-paint spaces within the lines.
Glitter, Rhinestones Added
In the fall of ‘86, she added glitter and rhinestones. And for spring, 1987, she silk screens the large areas of color. The dots, hands, faces and feet are still hand painted, although Berg now hires high school students to do the job.
Satin roses and brass buttons punctuate the figure drawings on baggy cotton overalls with coordinated T-shirts in her new collection.
It’s fairly expensive to be Dressed to Dribble. A sweat suit, union suit or overalls and coordinated T-shirt costs $40. A T-shirt dress, $35.
Berg’s clothes are carried in 150 stores across the country, 24 of them in Los Angeles. Among them, So Much & Co. in Sunset Plaza, Imagine in Santa Monica, Bebe Boom in Beverly Center, Chez Kids in Encino, the Chocolate Giraffe in Pasadena, Lollipop and Pixietown in Beverly Hills and Fred Segal’s on Melrose Avenue and in Santa Monica.
