STYLE : Dressed to Thrill : Clients count on the fanciful evening creations of the couturier known as Gigi when they want something to steal the scene.
As gowns go, this one was pure Gigi.
It wasn’t the black velvet garment’s dramatic black overskirt lined in contrasting orange silk satin that captured everyone’s attention at the Ritz-Carlton black-tie dinner three years ago, but the 6-foot-long plume plucked from a Chinese pheasant that attached to the garment’s shoulder.
“People were grabbing my guest to take a picture of her,” Gigi recalls. “While she was sitting at the table, the tip of the feather kept touching a bald man’s head. And the waiters had a terrible time getting around it.”
Gigi had prepared for such difficulties. Ever the showman, he whisked the detachable plume from the woman’s gown and added it to the table’s centerpiece.
With his flair for theatrics and his expertise with a needle and thread, Gilda Conan, or Gigi to all who know him, has turned some of the county’s most prominent socialites into sparkling belles of the balls.
Gilda’s in Newport Beach is the closest thing to a French couture salon in the county. Here, among plastic boxes stuffed with sequins and beads, rolls of silk and dressmakers’ dummies, Gigi creates exotic, one-of-a-kind gowns.
“They are not your everyday dresses,” he says in the heavy French accent that his clients adore.
For Tina Schafnitz, a Newport Beach resident who frequently sports Gigi creations on the local party circuit, these are the kind of fantasy gowns “little girls dream about.”
When, for the first time, he puts her into a white sequined ball gown that she has ordered for a Performing Arts Center gala that she will attend the next week, she turns misty-eyed.
“I’ve been known to have tears in my eyes when I’ve gone for fitting,” she says. The gown is indeed a dream: a short strapless cocktail dress covered in pearly white sequins with gold beaded accents around the bodice and that has a white silk satin overskirt that fastens in front with a beaded bow. To complete the fantasy, Gigi has made bow earrings to match and a white sequined purse.
“This will be just perfect,” Schafnitz says, gazing happily at her reflection.
Gigi, who sports a ponytail and red-rimmed glasses, kneels at her feet adjusting the hem of the billowy skirt. He is lamenting--how to put this delicately--the small bust sizes in off-the-rack dresses.
“All of those things have no depth for the breasts,” he says, searching for the proper English.
His strapless gowns have built-in corsets so that they don’t fall down. They fit the wearer snugly “without looking like a sausage.”
“There’s no good dress without a good foundation,” Gigi says.
He hates customers’ wanting to sacrifice beauty for comfort.
“We are always fighting,” he jokes.
When he wins, a gown will have a small train that brushes the floor.
“With a train, the line looks wonderful, the dress dramatic,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than a short evening gown. My dresses always break on the shoe.”
His clients can count on Gigi to give their gowns a theatrical touch that makes them stand out from the crowd. That might be the famous pheasant feather or the neon-colored sequins that he saved from the ‘60s or the 25 yards of red silk satin used to make a coat.
When Tiffany & Co. threw a gala to celebrate its new South Coast Plaza store several years ago, Gigi fitted Kathryn Thompson with a navy bugle-beaded gown and bolero adorned with the signature Tiffany canary diamond on the back. Press photographers practically pulled the jacket apart to get her picture, he says.
“I’m trying to make (my gowns) not too dated, not too trendy,” he says. “They are, I hope, timeless. They are dramatic, and they go with the personality of the client. One needs a lot of personality to carry off a gown with 600 feathers.”
Often he’s inspired by fabric. He will see a bolt of silk and say, “That’s Mrs. So-and-So.”
Whenever a big social affair is about to occur in Orange County, he’s on the telephone to one of his regular customers.
“I’m calling them and saying, ‘Here comes that ball; now what are you going to wear? OK, this is what you’ll wear.’ ”
Gigi makes everything himself: the gowns, the matching jewelry, the little beaded handbags.
He works alone, and he works fast.
On a recent morning, he was in constant motion--sewing big rhinestones on a black suede hat, adjusting the hooks to a matching belt, cutting out beaded appliques he stitched by hand the day before on a piece of organza, adding Alencon lace and beads to a clutch purse and hemming a client’s gown--all within an hour.
“It’s amazing how much you can do if you’re not disturbed.”
He has no employees because he was never satisfied with their work.
“I’m used to a certain way of working,” he says. “I don’t do well with employees. I have certain standards, so I just decided I’d do it myself.”
Gigi is a self-taught tailor who learned his trade through various jobs in his native Paris. While working as a model for Dior early in his career, he would spend the hours waiting to go before the camera in the workroom finding out how couture garments were made.
He also worked as a cancan dancer and made costumes for the shows. His skill with beadwork stems from the six years he worked for a company sewing beads on couture creations by Dior, Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent.
He came to America in 1979, working in Las Vegas as a dancer and a costume maker. Eventually he gave up dancing and began making his own theatrical gowns.
He opened his salon in Newport Beach in 1984 and has been dressing socialites ever since.
Gigi usually begins his creations by designing a basic gown and adding “bits and pieces that make it a costume.” By making a detachable sequined shoulder piece, a wrap, a skirt or a feather boa, he can give the gown a new look.
To one simple gown covered with black bugle beads, he added a coral-colored sequined applique and a matching feather boa, then transformed the gown by replacing the coral with black-and-white silk flowers, feathers and a beaded corset.
“Certain people are prisoners of their legend. They’re known for not wearing the same outfit twice,” he says. “With the amount of parties they go to, that’s expensive.”
Transforming a gown can help them save money. Gigi doesn’t divulge prices, but the adage “if you have to ask you probably can’t afford it” is true here. He has just 30 regular clients who come to him for gowns and other custom clothes, but that’s more than enough to keep him busy.
“It doesn’t sound like much,” Gigi says between stitches on a lace bolero, “but it’s all I can handle.”
