They Spin Dreams With Needle and Thread at Bridal City
Little girls play dress-up and imagine a worn sheet as a regal ball gown, old shoes as jeweled slippers.
When they grow up they conjure the dormant memories of those dream dresses and have them sewn into reality at Bridal City.
The shop sits on a noisy downtown corner across from Grand Central Market. In the windows, grinning mannequins tempt customers with Scarlett O’Hara-inspired creations.
Women come through the door clutching tattered fashion ads and brides’ magazines as hefty as phone books. Sometimes they have no concrete idea at all of how they want their dresses, just a vague notion of perfection in taffeta and lace.
Elizabeth Robledo is here for the final fitting for her quinceanera dress. She’s been hanging around the store for four hours, passing the time with her family, including her mother, father, aunt, toddler nephew and a few very large brothers who wander through the store perusing tuxedo catalogues, chasing after the nephew, watching pearls being applied to lace and chatting with the store owner.
“I’m the only girl,” says Elizabeth, hunching over a counter eyeing a sleeve that’s being decorated. “I just have brothers,” she explains, and it’s evident why her parents are splurging on the quinceanera ceremony (celebrating a girl’s 15th birthday) and why they’ve chosen such a lavish dress.
The dress. It starts with a cream satin handkerchief-hem skirt over several layers of cream tulle that end at her ankles. The top is strapless; there will be a matching satin vest with a Queen Anne collar to be worn at church. The gown is embellished with lace, pearls and sequins. Tiny fuchsia pearls pick up the fuchsia and ivory dresses that the attendants will wear.
Finally Elizabeth is ushered into a dressing room for the fitting, her mother right behind. The dress is slipped on over a tulle petticoat, the unfinished vest tried on for size.
Her mother gazes approvingly at the bell-shaped gown, eyes scanning up and down as her daughter stands upright, her arms raised while a fitter pins the bodice.
“Puffy, huh?” says Elizabeth, smiling at the understatement.
Bridal City’s specialty is copying existing styles of formal wear, usually for a fraction of the retail price. It’s the hope of saving hundreds of dollars that compels women to drive miles for their bridal, prom and evening dresses.
“What we do is fantasy,” says Yolanda Rossi, the shop’s owner since 1979. She retains her graceful, upright carriage from when she was a professional flamenco dancer. Designing her own costumes led her into this business.
Fantasies are created in a store that has seen better days. The pristine white bridal gowns that hang on racks are in stark contrast to the slight griminess, residue from the recent riots.
Smoke damage has taken its toll. Downstairs, jewel-encrusted dresses hang gritty with soot, and walls are still smeared with streaks of black. Yet the frilly clothes in various stages of completion around the store are like eye candy.
Even during the rare few minutes when there are no customers, Bridal City has its own sense of perpetual motion. The cutter slices through huge bolts of tulle, velvet and satin. Two women dot bits of glue and deftly affix pearls and sequins.
Most customers come with a crowd in tow: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, babies in car seats and toddlers who waddle up and down the carpet. Boyfriends sit and fidget, looking excruciatingly bored. In one corner a young couple sit thigh-to-thigh, kissing, touching, so totally in love that they’d be oblivious to a train wreck.
Some brides stride in with a no-nonsense attitude, hauling loose-leaf notebooks filled with pages of detailed to-do lists, tapping red nails on the glass case impatiently while they wait to get their business done.
Others arrive in mid-frazzle. One young bride-to-be, frustrated by a glitch, fights back tears as she plays the waiting game.
Yolan Smith, Yvonne Williams and Stefani Spruill are three backup singers in search of The Perfect Dress to take them through a five-week tour of Japan with Japanese pop singer Yazawa.
“This is gonna be so cool!” Williams bubbles, hovering over a magazine spread of the Diet Pepsi Uh-Huh girls, dressed in tight little gold lame numbers.
It’s a warm Wednesday afternoon and the three are discussing the essential components for their outfits: short, shiny and sophisticated.
Smith picks up a dress made of indigo silk covered with iridescent bugle beads and asks about outfits in that fabric. The material alone would be expensive--perhaps $100 a yard--but its look can be approximated.
Another day, a young woman waits for her prom dress, drooping in a chair, head in hands.
“I hope it looks like the picture,” she says wearily. “I said, ‘ Please make sure it looks like the picture. Please .’ I’m gonna cry if it doesn’t.”
She shows a picture of a white satin gown, with heart-shaped cut-outs on the sleeves and dangling rows of pearls.
“Everybody has their dresses done custom now,” she says.
Theresa Flores and her mother, Linda Flores, have been waiting more than an hour for their fittings.
Theresa seems eager to offer details of her wedding; she’s a kindergarten teacher, she’s marrying her high school sweetheart, there will be six bridesmaids, she is the first daughter to be married.
“I took different parts from three different dresses,” Theresa says, holding out magazine pictures, folded and stapled together to make one gown. In its final form, it’s a white satin and lace, floor-length, slim-fitting gown, with puffed sleeves and an illusion bodice decorated with pearls.
The headpiece and veil are brought into the dressing room, and then the train. Theresa eases into them and turns to her mother, who is gazing somewhat unbelieving at her daughter, her first-born, her first to get married.
“Don’t you dare cry,” Theresa says.
