The Bride Wore Anything But White in a Dress By Susan Lane
After Carol Ramey and her boyfriend made plans to marry on their houseboat, she realized that she didn’t want to wear a traditional white wedding dress.
“I’m a little older than the average bride,” said Ramey, who is 40 and getting married for the second time. “I wanted something unique.”
She spotted a photo of an elegant dress in a bridal magazine and sought out the designer, Susan Lane. When she finally walked in the door of Lane’s Toluca Lake boutique, Country Elegance, Ramey said she felt that she had “died and gone to heaven.”
“This dress is perfect, exactly what I wanted,” Ramey said of her $450 purchase. “It’s a blush chiffon with an intermission hemline. It has a V-neck, bellman sleeves, satin rosettes in front and the bodice is cotton. The dress is floor-length and rises up about eight inches in front.”
When it comes to designing bridal attire, 50-year-old Lane has always had a flair for the slightly off-beat.
‘Romantic Valentines’
“You see, a lot of people don’t look good in white,” Lane said. “Anybody with pale skin, for instance, usually looks much better in a dress with color. We work with lots of color, but I like to think of them as valentines . . . romantic valentines. The majority of the colors we work with, such as blush, are so muted you don’t even notice that it’s color--you just notice its warmth.” (When Lane recently remarried for the fourth time, she wore a silver silk Charmeuse dress with an intermission hemline, hand-painted flowers and beadwork on the bodice and a plunging neckline.)
Lane’s million-dollar business (“once I passed a million dollars, which was in 1984, I stopped giving figures,” she said) happened almost by accident.
An art major, “home sewer” and housewife in the 1960s, Lane started “laying out patchwork skirts on my pool table. I hate to throw things away. I think the first skirt I did I used pink burlap and yellow. . . . I used to wear it all the time to entertain, and people would just go crazy.”
After selling one of the patchwork skirts in a friend’s store, Lane sewed two more, graduated to mass production and then, 20 years ago, opened her own shop in Studio City. (She moved the store to Toluca Lake in 1982.) “Now we’ve even gone into manufacturing. We have a 10,000-square-foot factory in Sherman Oaks,” said Lane, who lives in North Hollywood.
The designer makes most of her elegant, romantic dresses, which range in price from $350 to $500, in such fabrics as lace, chiffon, satin and satinet. “Satinet comes in so many great colors that drapes really nicely,” Lane said. “Some people want silk, but satinet is soft. If I were to show you a dress in silk and you were to feel it, you could not tell the difference between that and satinet.”
Lane’s philosophy of design does not begin and end with her dress line. Country Elegance is full of wedding touches: wicker baskets full of silk roses are casually strewn on the blond wood floor. Sepia-toned, turn-of-the-century brides and grooms stare sweetly from photos hanging on the walls. Antique gowns, oak dressers, hat boxes and a peach satin sofa complete the look--in addition to a little, lace-covered table that offers wine and pretzels.
“The men love those,” Lane said, laughing. “It’s just a real nice touch, especially when the men come in, because they don’t have anything to do . . . and they can sit down, have a glass of wine--and more and more, we’re getting men in here.
“When I first started business, you’d never get a man in here,” she added. “You had everybody wanting white, and the brides were 18. Now they’re 30; the men come with them. They help them pay for the dress and the brides choose dresses with some color in them. It’s been a gradual trend.”
Krylon Gown
Another trend in wedding gear that Lane has fueled is the paper gown, a $140 dress that is actually made of Krylon, an interfacing. “You wear it once, then throw it away, since a lot of people only wear their wedding dress once anyway,” Lane said. “Or you can have the guests sign the train and use the train for a guest book. Also, if you don’t like the hem length, you can just snip it shorter.”
Jamie Nehen, a 23-year-old secretary from Encino, opted for a pink lace gown over a satin slip for a garden wedding. “I wanted something cool and comfortable, plus I thought traditional just wouldn’t fit. We’re having a country-style wedding. And pink is my favorite color,” said Nehen, who paid $500 for her dress.
Occasionally a bride picks something bold and bright. “About three years ago,” Lane said, “a bride planned to get married on Christmas Eve and we made her a red wedding dress. Thinking of the Christmas theme, we also made her bouquets of soft green ferns.”
Sometimes the bride wears black. “One gal called us and said, ‘Black is my signature; I always wear black.’ We tried several things on her and, sure enough, she looked best in black. So I figured, ‘Well, if you’re going to do it, do something very romantic, very 1920s.’ ”
‘Art Deco-Looking’
Or sometimes the bride wears white--and the bridesmaids wear black. “Now 10 years ago, that would have been shocking,” Lane said. “But it’s very Art Deco-looking. It’s very sophisticated.” (Thinking beyond the wedding day, Lane carries two-piece outfits that can be worn elsewhere. “I really want to work with the girls so they can wear their dress again--bridesmaids too,” said Lane, whose bridesmaids’ outfits average about $165.)
“We do custom dresses for people who might have figure problems,” Lane said. “We choose a fabric, and come in and we might match the top with the bottom, where, let’s say, they have heavy hips.”
Helping out in the custom area is Sigrid Bailly, who tends to nervous brides in a small room styled after a shingled, Victorian house. Sigrid’s one-of-a-kind Heirloom Collection dresses range from $400 to $1,300.
Lane also specializes in particuar looks, such as the 1940s bride, the Victorian bride and the 1950s bride. “What we’re saying, and it’s really true, is the brides of the ‘90s can wear all those different styles,” Lane said.
