<i> Couturier </i> Practices Vanishing Art : Clothing: Gigi, and Gigi alone, creates his one-of-a-kind designs for some of the county’s best-known society women.
Money. That’s exactly what it takes to have a perfectly fitted evening gown, and Gildas Conan, a custom dressmaker in Orange County, makes no exceptions.
He walks to the front door of his shop not far from Fashion Island in Newport Beach wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. He has a ponytail and perfectly manicured eyebrows.
As he unlocks the door, the visitor is not sure whether he’s the hired help or the designer who works with Orange County’s best-known society women.
Conan, who prefers to be called Gigi, greets his visitor in his native French accent and desperately scurries to find a chair.
In the front entrance, there’s a small table with women’s accessories: colorful necklaces, bracelets and rings with brilliant stones.
Gigi is one of a slowly vanishing breed of fashion designers known as couturiers. The couture business traces its origins to a 19th-Century Englishman named Charles F. Worth, who crystallized the fashion of the era and founded the French custom dressmaking industry. Worth was the first to tell his customers what they could and could not wear and the first to develop a rapid succession of new ideas and designs. Until the time of Worth, dressmakers had little influence on design.
Throughout the 19th Century, other couturiers with names such as Paquin, Doucet, Callot Soeurs and Redfern established their reputations. Custom dressmakers traveled regularly between New York and Paris, bringing back French ideas and French fabric for their well-heeled clientele. Every bride who could afford it had her trousseau made by Worth, and many wealthy women ordered gowns from his house by mail.
As time went by, however, couturiers slowly faded from the fashion scene. Women became more involved with juggling careers, family and outside activities, Gigi said, and had less time to spend on fittings and waiting weeks or months for a handmade gown.
Gigi scoffed at the many department stores and fashion designers who like to refer to themselves as couturiers, complaining that they make a mockery of the true meaning of the French term.
“Retail is not couture,” he sniffed. “They are simply making alterations. You’ll never see them make or design one special dress for a lady.”
“I am not retail at all,” Gigi said. “There is nothing for duplication or for sale here. Everything comes from the looms and beadwork.”
Gigi says his evening gowns are 95% handmade, contrasted with 75% handwork for most couturiers. And, not surprisingly, customers pay dearly for the luxury of a custom-made gown. Gigi’s gowns start at $4,000 and can range up to $26,000. Bridal gowns start at $7,000.
Gigi differentiates himself from Amen Wardy, proprietor of an exclusive women’s wear shop in Newport Center’s Fashion Island. He points out that each of his gowns are one-of-a-kind designs, whereas Wardy sells clothing by other top fashion designers as well as his own.
Gigi, 39, moved from Paris in 1981 and settled in Las Vegas, where he worked as a musical theater dancer for two years. Realizing that he couldn’t earn a living as a dancer forever, he decided to study fashion design.
He says his best training came from doing the beading on costumes for members of the Paris Opera.
He came to Orange County in 1984 and has about 25 regular clients, the most well-known of whom is probably Debbie Reynolds. Most of his customers are from the Newport Beach area, but he has others in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York. But don’t expect to walk in to Gigi’s shop: Customers are seen by appointment only.
The Newport Beach designer says that Orange County society women are quite different from their counterparts in Paris, where he worked as subcontractor for Chanel and Christian Dior.
“They need a bit of education here in Orange County on fashion. They’re very casual. Not my clients, of course, but the rest of them,” Gigi said. “I think it’s California and the laid-back atmosphere.
“The Orange County lady will not sacrifice comfort for looks. My personal clients, of course, love looks. If they can deal without a train, however, they will,” he said. “In Paris, a woman is willing to be bothered with a train all night just for the sake of the look walking down the staircase at the opera.”
But his business hasn’t always been glamorous and prosperous.
When Gigi first opened his shop, he says, “I was wondering how I would pay the rent. I never advertised in any of the papers or put pictures of my dresses anywhere.”
His big break came four years ago when Kathryn Thompson, a prominent Orange County developer, asked him to make a dress for her. Gigi said: “It was like, ‘Ta da! He must not be all that bad.’ ”
Gigi, Thompson says, “is very meticulous with his beading work.”
Nora Hester, a Corona del Mar resident known for her charity work with Childrens Hospital of Orange County in Orange, heard about Gigi from a neighbor two years ago.
“It’s nothing you can find on the rack,” Hester said. “You get the fabric, color and style you want. He really delivers, and the amazing thing is that he does all the intricate beading work himself.”
In a recent interview in his shop, Gigi pointed to a wall where photos were hung of women wearing the dresses he had made for them. Dramatic evening gowns of thick, gorgeous silk. Ostrich feathers jutting from the shoulders. Brilliant colors and detailed beadwork.
Next to the photos are small boxes filled with beads, lace, thread, sequins, feathers, bits of fur and anything else that can add a frill or sparkle to a dress.
“I am experimental with every client,” Gigi said. The last ball he designed gowns for was for a fund-raiser organized by a chapter of the Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa last year. The theme for the benefit was “Heat wave.”
“I didn’t want to go Carmen Miranda, but I visualized sun, sky, seas, sand, tropical. So I created a dress, for the chairwoman, with strange colors: burgundy, tangerine, copper, purple, black with touches of khaki.
“It sounds terrible but looked wonderful. She had a bird of paradise on the shoulder with the body and long feathers trailing on the floor and a matching purse and jewelry.”
Gigi’s trademark, if you like, is the matching purse. He’ll purchase a plain purse, then decorate it with beads and sequins to match the same pattern as the dress.
One of his more memorable creations was a gown he likes to call the “Rain Forest” dress. The gown had a cascade of leaves draping down into three layers of silk in three shades of green. On one shoulder was a cascade of beaded orchids.
“But when these dresses are worn for another party,” Gigi said, “it will just be another elegant dress. There won’t be a tag on it reading, ‘I am Rain Forest.’ Someone might recognize it, but that’s another story.”
He has been asked to move his shop into Fashion Island, “but what for?” Gigi asks. “I don’t have time to even answer the phone.”
