Johanna and Millisa Houston Are as Unique as Their Creations From Another Time and Place : Like Mother, Like Daughter
If you don’t recognize the shop by the dried hydrangeas pinned to its door, maybe the music from the movie “Or lando” floating out to the street will stop you.
On Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, individuality is expected. Still, this little shop stands apart.
It belongs to Kevin Simon, or so the sign leads you to believe. And yes, there is a Kevin Simon, though he is actually a she. And she is actually named Millisa Houston.
Houston and her mother, Johanna, own the business. To say they do things their own way is only to hint at the truth.
Behind the store’s paned window and the small room it looks in on, filled with dried flowers, dress forms and a thrift-shop gilded mirror, is a bigger studio where the Houstons work. They spend most of every day sitting face to face over a mismatched pair of old sewing machines.
Millisa is 25 years old and her mother can’t be twice that. They seem as much like friends as relatives--two who know each other very well and have learned to let each other be.
Johanna owned a custom-dress business in Buffalo, N.Y., where the Houstons lived until about a year ago. A divorce and desire to start a new life urged them on to California. Johanna chose the store’s location. “This looked like a street where you could do what you wanted to do,” she explains.
She does the tailoring and makes the first samples of the clothes. Millisa, who was an art student in Buffalo, designs them. The dresses have the feeling of those worn by the women who lived down the road from the big house on a Southern plantation. Some suggest old-fashioned pinafores, with high waistlines and long, full skirts. Others have gussets or swags, for a period-piece feeling.
Some fashion details suggest hand-me-downs, or a very thrifty approach to dressmaking. Buttons on blouses don’t always match, although each might be made of mother of pearl. They come from vintage button-sample cards.
Some jacket shapes are modeled after artists’ smocks and 19th-Century waistcoats. Most everything is made of machine-washable fabrics, usually cotton, raw silk or linen. Even the jackets get washed at least once before leaving the store, giving them a slouchy, lived-in look.
It is hard to find a store where virtually everything is done by hand, but this is one. The Houstons use children’s watercolor kits to paint ceramic buttons that resemble garden fruits and vegetables. A wall of shelves is filled with fabrics folded into squares, not wound around bolts, because they need only a few yards at a time. Their obvious favorites are gingham checks and subtle plaids, which Millisa dyes dusty pastels. “I like muted colors, so the clothes show,” she says. Her dying department consists of a metal bucket in the back yard.
She also hand-finishes the hang tags in artistic penmanship (prices range from about $100 to $400) and produces mail-order catalogues using dark-toned construction papers, small photographs, sketches and fabric swatches tied with ribbon. The glue shows at the swatch edges, as on grade-school projects. The same child-like touch influences her fashion designs.
Imagine a cutaway jacket with four big, mismatched buttons but only two buttonholes. The effect is all the more eccentric given Millisa’s sophisticated inspirations. The cutaway jacket is called the George Sand, named for the 19th-Century British author who changed her name from Amandine Dupin and wore men’s clothes. “I think of the time in history when women were strong and independent. They were struggling to be artists,” Millisa says.
Most of what you see in the store is made to order. Customers make an appointment, try on samples, select fabrics and have things fitted to their proportions. The store attracts a number of large-size customers. “We enjoy dressing larger women. They are out of luck if they look for anything individual in most stores,” Johanna says.
Wedding gowns are in demand--long, graceful dresses with off-the-shoulder necklines, layers of blush-colored fabrics, silk rose trim. Prices start at about $500.
Although custom work is obviously the Houstons’ first love, wholesaling makes up half the business. They produce selections from their custom line in limited numbers, and sell them in boutiques, especially in the Northwest. Locally, they are carried at Harriett Dorn in Santa Monica.
To keep up with their work, both Houstons go back to it in the evening, after dinner. They have no full-time assistants, partly because they have yet to find seamstresses adept at making buttonholes, hem stitches and other finishing touches by hand.
To unwind after hours, Johanna quilts or gardens. Millisa paints, and her oil portraits decorate the workroom.
Everything about their way of doing things comes from family traditions, Johanna says. Her father still lives in St. Lucia, near Barbados. “Caribbeans are very creative people. First you try to do it yourself. And you always recycle.”
Why anyone would choose to attach a man’s name to this totally feminine environment is a mystery. “Simon is my family’s last name, and Kevin (Millisa) always wanted to be named Kevin,” Johanna says.
“I wanted to raise the question, could a man possibly know this much about a woman?” Millisa says. You get the feeling she already knows the answer.
