Spicer Puts Sweet Touch on Her Dresses for Girls
For designer Jackie Spicer, smaller is proving to be better. The Beverly Hills dressmaker has gone from being a career woman making career women’s dresses in the ‘70s to housewife, mother, and, now, children’s dress designer.
“It’s funny because before when I was a career woman, and not married, I needed dresses to go to work,” Spicer says. “Now that I’m a housewife and mother, I do children’s dresses, which is a perfect evolution.”
The classic American look of the girls’ dresses comes about in a traditional way. In Victorian times, fine lace and other fabrics and decorations were often recycled for new clothes. Spicer does the same, combining old lace, embroidered linen napkins, tableclothes, pillowcases (“I can only go up to a size 4”) and quilts with new fabrics. She will, for example, take a T-shirt or turtleneck and use an antique tablecloth as the skirt to create an empire dress.
“I love all this old stuff,” Spicer says. “And people are wearing it and enjoying it, so I guess it’s some form of recycling.”
Parents and children like the dresses because they’re loose fitting and comfortable, need no special care and have few buckles, snaps or buttons.
Before using the fabrics, “I wash everything in hot (water) and hot dry,” she says. “All the fabrics are completely done in. They’ve already been beaten to death . . . I know they’re not going to disintegrate.”
The dresses are available at the Freehand boutique in Los Angeles and A Child’s Room in Beverly Hills. Retail prices range from $56 to $70.
Spicer started her career dress business in 1974 with partner Jane Singer. Singer & Spicer was grossing $4 million a year at its peak, and the partners, along with a group of other California designers, made the cover of Women’s Wear Daily.
When she started making dresses for her daughter, her friends wanted them for their children.
“I used to make them all myself, spent days and days sewing,” she says. Many of the dresses are one of a kind, with hand-sewn flowers and lace decorations. Now that she’s producing more than 200 dresses each season, she has hired a contractor, although she still does the cutting at home.
Spicer drafts her daughter, Gabrielle, 5, as a fitting model and “my poor son (Miles, 2 1/2) is my size 3 model. He hates it.”
“I don’t go too modern,” Spicer says of her designs. “I can’t do black and white, and I can’t do neon. There’s a market for everything, and I can’t put it down. I’m just one look: classic, American traditional.”
The children’s dresses are proving so popular that Spicer is being asked to do some women’s dresses again, especially mother-daughter outfits.
