Fashion 87 : ‘New Couture’ Offers Old World Services
For people who always find just what they want--but in the wrong size--or just what they need--but in the wrong color--a new type of shop is becoming popular. The category doesn’t have a name that fits, exactly. But retailers are calling it “the new couture.”
Technically, couture refers to clothes made by Paris designers and measured to fit just one customer. The new couture clothes are always original designs and are either custom-made or altered to fit. And, like classic couture designs, they can be ordered in various fabrics.
All of this is coming about thanks to a new breed of store owners who are not only retailers, but often, fashion designers as well. What they produce isn’t sold anywhere else. If they don’t actually make the clothes on display in their shops, they work with their own in-house designers to style original collections. And they often set up a factory right upstairs from the showroom, or very close by, so that special orders can be filled in a matter of days.
New-Style Shops
Some of these new-style shops have prices that start at about $100. Others start at more than $1,000. Some of the designers who work this way are hardly out of school. Others have been in business for a decade or more.
Client lists range from executive women to perpetual party girls. And the style each store promotes can be anything from tailored to froufrou.
One of the newest of the group, and among the most expensive, is Fe Zandi in Beverly Hills. It opened in October, and customers who want to see Zandi’s designs have to ask. Most of the stock is not on display. “We don’t want people running into merchandise; we like to take it to them,” explains the store’s managing director, Kamran Behbehani.
Designer Zandi’s second-floor workroom is filled with natural light and with half a dozen seamstresses wearing white smocks. Before she came to California, Zandi apprenticed in Paris at Jean Patou and Pierre Balmain, she says.
Her fashion taste is feminine, body conscious and shows off her Paris training. Her ready-to-wear collection of wool tweed suits for day includes a peplum jacket that nips in at the waist. Her skirts are short enough to show off legs.
For evenings, she prefers lavish fabrics--lace, cut velvet and silk taffeta. Some cocktail dresses are short in front but long and sweeping in back. And she makes a romantic little wrap to wear over long or short evening clothes--a mantle of earth-tone, cut-velvet flowers.
For all of her outfits, Zandi can make fabric-covered shoes to match. Day-wear prices start at $750; evening gowns begin at $1,500.
Asked about her clientele, Zandi says some are career women. “Or they are wives--with wealthy husbands--who need clothes for parties, trips and weddings.”
The Jody Russell boutique on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles is another world entirely. Her stock ranges from silky, bubble-style cocktail dresses--”for my Republican fund-raiser customers,” she jokes--to hip-looking, black-net-petticoat outfits she calls “rock ‘n’ roll” clothes.
Russell’s tiny design studio is part of the main room in her converted bungalow shop. She describes herself as an entrepreneur, not a dressmaker.
Russell worked as a personal shopper and handled celebrities’ stage wardrobes before she opened her store about a year ago, she says. She consults with the store’s in-house designer, Peggy Fetner, for her private-label styles, priced from about $300.
She also carries some ready-to-wear clothes by other designers. Everything is for special occasions.
More shops like hers are opening because people want individual attention when they’re spending a lot of money, Russell says. In addition, she says, she and “the other little-guy shops are fighting the boredom factor.” She says she sees it in some bigger stores where the merchandise is predictable and the atmosphere can be impersonal and cold. Her motto: “Spend money in my store and I won’t forget you.”
For women who don’t spend a lot of time in stores, the efficiency factor of the new couture system is very appealing. Susanna Chung Forest, the designer-owner of Susanna Beverly Hills, says many of her regular customers live in distant cities and buy whole wardrobes from her by telephone. She keeps a file on all of them, about their sizes, measurements and personal tastes.
Chung Forest remembers one recent call placed by a woman who was carrying her cold-weather clothes while traveling on business in wintry London. From there she decided to go on to hot, dry Australia and needed another wardrobe. “My fall collection was in the store,” Chung Forest begins. “But I made her some outfits in summer fabrics and sent them to her in Australia to arrive when she got there.”
Ninety percent of Chung Forest’s business is special order, and most of her customers are traveling executives, she says. One of her full-time staff does nothing but keep her supplied with the range of fabrics for hot and cold climates she works with year-round.
Classic Jackets
She styles classic jackets and skirts, perfectly finished, in top-quality fabrics. Instead of corporate gray or black, she shows untraditional colors, such as lemon yellow, hunter green and royal blue. “I want my lady judges to take off their black robes and show off a red dress underneath,” she says.
Often she repeats a design from season to season, and she expects customers to wear their purchases for seven years or more. She says the key to long-term designs is: “Don’t pay attention to fashion.”
Her straight-cut skirts are knee length; she calls anything shorter ridiculous. “What do you do with a miniskirt three years from now when it’s out, not the trend?” she asks.
Ankle-length riding skirts, fitted through the hips, are out of style right now, she notes. But Chung Forest still shows them in her store. “They are to wear with boots and a big cashmere sweater for travel,” she says.
High-Profile Clients
Several of her dresses, with matching jackets piped in contrasting colors, were originally for Cybill Shepherd to wear on “Moonlighting,” she says. Other of her high-profile clients include a professional race-car driver and a television network president, she says.
Her prices for daytime outfits are about $1,200. Many of her evening clothes are the identical styles, made in dressy fabrics.
At Theo in Los Angeles, the idea is similar. Most shoppers there are career women. And while the store is filled with separates to mix and match, owner Judy Yaras says one-third of her business is special order.
Yaras assumes everything she sells off the rack will need alterations. She sizes her stock in a general way--small, medium and large.
“Women who shop here know they’ll get something that is one of a kind,” Yaras says. “They won’t walk into a business meeting to see four other women in the same jacket or dress.”
Plaids and Tweeds
She shows plaids and tweeds to wear with silky shirts in tiny geometric prints. Her jackets are more than hip length. She teams them with knee-length skirts for one long, straight-line effect.
Yaras specializes in an Establishment, unmatched-suit look. But she makes it more interesting by offering unlikely colors, such as fuchsia and raspberry.
Some women tell Yaras that they want to look powerful. She makes them a tailored jacket in red. Some who are powerful want to appear low key. She shows them the same style jacket in beige or gray, she says.
Her prices range from $128 for skirts and pants to $390 for her most expensive jackets. She works with her own pattern maker and has the clothes sewn together in nearby factories.
Yaras says among the things the new couture shops tell her about ready-to-wear shopping, one message is most clear. Women want clothes to look expensive, even if they are not. And they’ve learned that it’s all in the details.
