The Great Gown Dust-Up : A Tangled Tale of Designs for the Inaugural Dresses Finds Three Happy Students and an Ocean of Silence

The first fashion flap of the new Administration erupted this week, even before the inaugural oaths were read.

The convoluted question of what Marilyn Quayle, wife of the incoming vice president, will or will not wear will be answered today when she appears for the day’s events, from swearing-in through inaugural balls, in the just-announced hand-made original designs of three Los Angeles fashion students.

Trendy designer Victor Costa, whose dresses she was first reported to have chosen, could not be reached for comment. He was in Washington to attend the full schedule of festivities.

Heroes of this week’s fashion drama are the three students at Los Angeles’ Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, who were selected last November by Mrs. Quayle to design her inaugural clothes.

Labors in Secret

Denise Ervin, Dan Caudill and Allison Miller have toiled on their historic sewing project ever since, without leaking a word to the press. Once the word got out Wednesday, the three said: “We were shocked. We’re still shocked. We’re very excited. We’re thrilled.” They were talking from Washington, where they’ve been holed up at a hotel for a week, putting finishing touches--and re-touches--on their designs.

Not so heroic, according to the vice-presidential press office, were designer Costa and some fashion press, who not only released incorrect news about Quayle’s choice, but compounded the error by mentioning anything at all about Marilyn Quayle’s inaugural clothes.

“We wanted no mention of Mrs. Quayle’s choices until after the President-elect’s wife announced hers,” press aide Barbara Balzano said. “We did not want to look as if we’re upstaging Barbara Bush, which is something of which we’ve already been accused.”

Mrs. Bush didn’t make it any easier. Apparently in a whimsical mood, she told Women’s Wear Daily on Monday, “I’m not telling. I don’t know why, but I’m not. It’s just fun not to.” (The fashion trade paper nonetheless revealed in that same article, that New York designer Arnold Scaasi had designed the gown Mrs. Bush would wear to the ball.)

The students got their job because Mrs. Quayle wanted to advance the cause of America’s student designers, Balzano said. Quayle first contacted the school’s Washington branch, which doesn’t have an advanced program and so forwarded her request to the main L.A. campus, where officials selected the three students most likely capable of doing the needed work.

“Sometimes I think our parents are more excited than we are. My mom cries every time I talk to her,” said Allison Miller, 24, of Long Beach, who designed 10-year-old Second Daughter Corinne Quayle’s inaugural outfit: a robin’s egg blue wool dress and cream-color wool coat and beret.

Caudill Swearing-In Suit Designer

Daniel Caudill, 22, who lives with his parents in Orange County, designed Mrs. Quayle’s swearing-in suit. It’s of royal blue wool with dropped shoulders, intricate seaming, has a matching coat and modified bowler hat. Caudill says his school is considering this “a homework project, but it’s harder than any homework we’ve ever had.” Without their instructor, Hubert Latimer, Caudill said, “we might never have gotten through.” Latimer is in Washington with the three.

Denise Ervin, 32, who designed the inaugural ballgown (but will not describe it “because we’re waiting for Mrs. Bush to describe hers first”) is from Omaha, Neb., where she was a costume designer at Omaha Community Playhouse for 11 years.

The three students are in the institute’s Advanced Study Program, which has eleven students this semester and which they describe as being “like a fashion graduate school.”

The students say that after being selected, they did preliminary sketches and assembled fabric swatches while in Los Angeles. Then they flew to Washington on about Dec. 7, where they showed their ideas to Mrs. Quayle in her office opposite the White House. They saw her again on Dec. 8, when she selected the styles and colors she preferred. They then went home to sew, and returned a week ago for fittings and alterations. Their final fittings were Monday.

During all this time, Victor Costa was apparently under the mistaken assumption that his jade green silk dress with portrait neckline would be worn by Quayle to the inaugural ball.

“Mrs. Quayle did come here and make selections,” Bob Miller, managing director of the Costa firm, said Wednesday. “She selected a color and style of gown in a tea length. Then we got a call that that she wanted it full length. Her office told us it was needed by a very definite date. It became a much more important dress.

“We even went out and bought the beautiful silk satin at retail (prices) because we didn’t want to order it (wholesale) and take a chance of being late.”

The dress arrived at Mrs. Quayles’s on time; she has paid for it and now owns it. Whether it will come out of the closet for any event this weekend, no one really knows for sure.