Julia M. Kestner; Well-Known Dressmaker

Julia Mary Kestner, a well-known dressmaker early in the century, has died in a nursing home of heart failure. She was 99.

Born in 1896 in Waukesha, Wis., Julia Mary Groeff, who died Tuesday, moved to Chicago in 1900 with her parents and four sisters. At age 12--shortly after her father’s death in an accident at the brewing factory where he worked--she went to work as a dressmaker to help support her family.

By age 13, she was part of a team of women making dresses--copied from Paris fashions--for the nation’s elite.

One of the dresses Kestner made is on display in the Smithsonian museum in Washington--it’s a replica of the black, beaded dress First Lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson wore to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1927. The original dress could not be found, so museum curators dressed the First Lady’s likeness with a duplicate Kestner had made for a wealthy socialite.

After her marriage in 1928 to George Kestner, Julia Kestner made clothes only for her family. In 1953 and 1956, she lived in London, where her husband worked as a quality control engineer for a company that made the Comptometer, a counting machine that was a predecessor to today’s computers.

The couple lived in Chicago until 1966, when they moved to Camarillo to be near their only daughter, Julianne Gleeson.

In her later years, Kestner took care of two of her sisters, Margaret and Gertrude Groeff, who had both been injured in a plane crash in 1973. Her husband died of lung cancer the next year.

In 1988, she moved to the Mary Health of the Sick nursing home in Newbury Park.

Kestner is survived by her daughter; one sister, Elizabeth Zerbian of Boca Raton, Fla.; and three grandchildren.

Arrangements are being made by Pierce Brothers Griffin Mortuary in Thousand Oaks. Burial will be held Monday at the Santa Clara Cemetery.