“No. Help them. If we can help them, we can profit from them. Look, I’ve been at Bonwit Teller all week doing sketches in the bridal suite. I’ve been listening. The salesclerks say they can’t keep up with orders. And all week I’ve been hearing customers complain about the lack of variety. Nobody wants the same dress as anyone else, but there aren’t that many dresses to choose from. I overheard a girl the other day saying that she would sew her own wedding dress, just to make it unique, if only she knew how.”
“Do you want me to teach girls how to sew their own wedding dresses?” I asked. “Most of those girls couldn’t sew a potholder.”
“No. I think we should make wedding dresses.”
“Too many people make wedding dresses already, Marjorie. It’s an industry of its own.”
“Yeah, but we can make nicer ones. I could sketch the designs and you could sew them. We know materials better than anyone else, don’t we? And our gimmick would be to create new gowns out of old ones. You and I both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that’s being imported. With my contacts, I can find old silk and satin all over town—hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France; they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there—and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller. I’ve seen you take good lace off old tablecloths before, to make costumes. Couldn’t you make trims and veils the same way? We could create one-of-a-kind wedding dresses for girls who don’t want to look like everyone else in the department stores. Our dresses wouldn’t be industry; they would be custom tailored. Classic. You could do that, couldn’t you?”
“Nobody wants to wear a used, old wedding dress,” I said.
But as soon as I spoke these words, I remembered my friend Madeleine, back in Clinton at the beginning of the war. Madeleine, whose gown I had created by tearing up both of her grandmothers’ old silk wedding dresses and combining them into one concoction. That gown had been stunning.
Seeing that I was beginning to catch on, Marjorie said, “What I’m picturing is this—we open a boutique. We’ll use your classiness to make the place seem high tone and exclusive. We’ll play up the fact that we import our materials from Paris. People love that. They’ll buy anything if you tell them it came from Paris. It won’t be a total lie—some of the stuff will come from France. Sure, it will come from France in barrels stuffed full of rags, but nobody needs to know this. I’ll sort out the treasures, and you’ll make the treasures into better treasures.”
“Are you talking about having a store?”
“A boutique, Vivian. God, honey, get used to saying the word. Jews have stores; we shall have a boutique.”
“But you are Jewish.”
“Boutique, Vivian. Boutique. Practice saying it with me. Boutique. Let it roll off your tongue.”
“Where do you want to do this?” I asked.
“Down around Gramercy Park,” she said. “That neighborhood will always be fancy. I’d like to see the city try to tear those town houses down! That’s what we’re selling to people—the idea of fancy. The idea of classic. I want to call it L’Atelier. There’s a building down there I’ve been eyeing. My parents told me they’ll give me half the payment from the city when Lowtsky’s gets demolished—as well they should, having worked me like a stevedore ever since I was a babe in arms. My cut will be just enough to buy the place I’m looking at.”
I was watching her mind work and whip—and honestly, it was a little scary. She was moving awfully fast.
“The building I want is on Eighteenth Street, one block from the park,” she went on. “Three stories, with a storefront. Two apartments upstairs. It’s small, but it’s got charm. You could fake that it’s a little boutique on a quaint street in Paris. That’s the feeling we’re looking to create. It’s not in bad shape. I can find people to fix it up. You can live on the top floor. You know how I hate climbing stairs. You’ll like it—there’s a skylight in your apartment. Two skylights, actually.”
“You want us to buy a building, Marjorie?”
“No, honey, I want me to buy a building. I know how much money you’ve got in the bank—and no offense, Vivian, but you couldn’t afford Paramus, much less Manhattan. Although you can afford to buy into the business, so we’ll go halfsies on that. But I’ll be the one who buys the building. It will cost me every dime I have, but I’m willing to shoot the whole works at it. I’m damn sure not going to rent a place—what am I, an immigrant?”
“Yes,” I said. “You are an immigrant.”
“Immigrant or no, the only way people make money in retail in this city is by owning property, not by selling clothes. Ask the Saks family—they know. Ask the Gimbel family—they know. Although we will make money selling clothes, too, because our wedding gowns will be simply lovely, thanks to your considerable talents, and mine. So, yes, Vivian, in conclusion: I want me to buy a building. I want you to design wedding dresses, I want us to run a boutique, and I want both of us to live upstairs. That’s the plan. Let’s live together, and let’s work together. It’s not as though we’ve got anything else going on, right? Just say you’ll do it.”
I gave her proposal deep and serious consideration for about three seconds, and then said, “Sure. Let’s do it.”
—
If you’re wondering whether this decision turned out to be a giant mistake, Angela, it didn’t. In fact, I can tell you right now how it all turned out: Marjorie and I made sublime wedding gowns together for decades; we earned enough money to support ourselves comfortably; we took care of each other like family; and I live in that same building to this day. (I know I’m old, but don’t worry—I can still climb those stairs.)
I never made a better choice than to throw in my lot with Marjorie Lowtsky and to follow her into business.
Sometimes it’s just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.
—
All that said, it was not easy work.
As with costumes, wedding gowns are not sewn but built. They are intended to be monumental, and so it takes a monumental amount of effort to make one. My gowns were especially time-consuming because I wasn’t starting with bolts of clean, fresh fabrics. It’s harder to make a new dress from an old dress (or from several old dresses, as in my case), because you must disassemble the old dress first, and then your options will be limited by how much material you are able to glean from it. Besides which, I was working with aging and fragile textiles—antique silks and satins, and ancient spiderwebs of lace—which meant that I had to use an especially careful hand.
Marjorie would bring me sacks of old wedding and christening gowns that she scavenged from God knows where, and I would pick through them judiciously, to see what I could work with. Often the materials were yellowed with age or stained down the bodice. (Never give a bride a glass of red wine!) So my first task would be to soak the garment in ice water and vinegar to clean it. If there was a stain that I couldn’t remove, I’d have to cut around it, and figure out how much I could salvage of the old fabric. Or maybe I would turn that piece inside out, or use it as a lining. I often felt like a diamond cutter—trying to keep as much of the value of the original material as I could while shaving away what was flawed.
Then it was a question of how to create a dress that was unique. At some level, a wedding gown is just a dress—and like all dresses, it’s made of three simple ingredients: a bodice, a skirt, and sleeves. But over the years, with those three limited ingredients, I made thousands of dresses that were not at all alike. I had to do this, because no bride wants to look like another bride.