New World Entrepreneur Focuses on Nostalgia
In her quest to bring back a little bit of yesterday, designer Nancy Johnson started making history--of the fashion sort. Clothes with leopard spots and ostrich feathers tend to grab the headlines, but Los Angeles-based Johnson’s nostalgic lace-trimmed tea dresses and hand-embroidered frocks have quietly blossomed into a $23-million business.
New Boutique
Picture a great-grandmother’s dressing table with perfume bottles, powder puffs and doilies--that’s the mood of Johnson designs. And it’s the feeling she re-created in her new boutique at Saks in Beverly Hills. Her dress and suit silhouettes are reminiscent of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, but the nostalgia stops there. Making clothes with Old World charm, Johnson has become a New World entrepreneur.
She is one of the world’s largest users of handmade Chinese lace and embroidery for apparel, and she commutes to China and Hong Kong to work with hundreds of Chinese women who hand-produce the lace-trimmed and embroidered fabric she uses. Much of it is copied after antique French, Belgian and Swiss laces.
“In China, women can still replicate almost any lace,” Johnson explains. “But there are some, for instance from Brussels and the Netherlands, that are so intricate they will never be reproduced.”
Evaluating the quality of lace takes some expertise, and handmade varieties are the most desirable.
“Machine-made lace is typically flat and characterless, because the fabric has no imperfections,” Johnson explains. “Handmade lace has slight irregularities and a subtle unevenness that gives it a texture machines cannot capture.” Often, she adds, the reverse side looks as if it has been embroidered.
While she works with handmade laces most of the time, her major concession to industrialization is Venise, considered the finest machine variety. Johnson puts it on formal wedding gowns, as well as collars and cuffs for other suits and dresses.
Although her clothes are extremely feminine, she says many women are wearing them to the boardroom, not the tea room. “Lace is appealing to women who have reached a certain point in their lives and careers,” the 43-year-old designer says. “They don’t feel the need to dress according to a standard that businessmen have set. They allow themselves the luxury of dressing more femininely.”
She cites the success of Victoria magazine, a monthly that focuses on traditional life styles and designs, and notes that her customer treasures the sort of classics seen in the magazine.
Interests Changed
“This is the same woman who had earthenware pottery and handblown glass in the ‘60s, but now she’s buying fine linens and serving dinner with sterling, china and crystal,” Johnson explains.
When those same women were part of the counterculture, Johnson was dressing them in imported Indian skirts and tops, clothing she found when traveling around the world in a Volkswagen bus. “They weren’t just pretty clothes, but a symbol of the times, embodying a social phenomenon counter to the Machine Age,” says the designer.
“Now those women have matured and so have I. We still have an appreciation for anything that’s handmade, that speaks of quality. That’s why they’re willing to pay for lace.”
Johnson’s dresses sell for $200 to $400, depending on the amount of detail and lace trim, and which natural-fiber fabric is used: cotton, linen or silk.
Prices Expected to Increase
As labor costs rise in China, Johnson predicts inevitable price increases, or limitations on detail. She says she expects prices of her simplest pieces to increase to $250 or $300 next year, “or we’ll do things with much less lace--we can’t keep prices down and do what we do now.”
But Johnson seems unaffected by the problems of world economics. If anything is bothering her, it’s jet lag. Her whirlwind life style continues, and she finds herself traveling one week to Hong Kong, the next to London and then rushing back to Los Angeles after a tour of duty in New York. Both Harrods and Selfridge’s in London feature her work.
Like so many of her customers, she says she can’t slow down. “What I really love to do is just be at home and look at books about lace. Now that’s a treat.”
