City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

“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.

  So it was challenging work, yes—both physically and creatively. I had assistants over the years, and that helped a bit, but I never found anyone who could do what I could do. And since I couldn’t bear to create a L’Atelier dress that was anything less than impeccable, I put in the long hours myself to make sure that each gown was a piece of perfection. If a bride said—on the evening before her wedding—that she wanted more pearls on her bodice, or less lac
e, then I would be the one up after midnight making those changes. It takes the patience of a monk to do this kind of detail work. You have to believe that what you are creating is sacred.

  Fortunately, I happened to believe that.

  Of course, the greatest challenge in building wedding dresses is learning how to handle the customers themselves.

  In offering my service to so many brides over the years, I became delicately attuned to the subtleties of family, money, and power—but mostly, I had to learn how to understand fear. I learned that girls who are about to get married are always afraid. They’re afraid that they don’t love their fiancés enough or that they love them too much. They’re afraid of the sex that is coming to them or the sex that they are leaving behind. They’re afraid of the wedding day going awry. They’re afraid of being looked at by hundreds of eyes—and they’re afraid of not being looked at, in case their dress is all wrong or their maid of honor is more beautiful.

  I recognize, Angela, that in the great scale of things, these are not monumental concerns. We had just come through a world war in which millions died and millions more saw their lives destroyed; clearly the anxiety of a nervous bride is not a cataclysmic matter, in comparison. But fears are fears, nonetheless, and they bring strain upon the troubled minds who bear them. I came to see it as my task to alleviate as much fear and strain as I could for these girls. More than anything, then, what I learned over the years at L’Atelier was how to help frightened women—how to humble myself before their needs, and how to lend myself to their wishes.

  For me, this education started as soon as we opened for business.

  The first week of our boutique’s existence, a young woman wandered in, clutching our advertisement from The New York Times. (This was Marjorie’s sketch of two guests at a wedding admiring a willowy bride. One woman says, “That gown is so poetical! Did she bring it home from Paris?” The second woman replies, “Why, almost! It comes from L’Atelier, and their gowns are the fairest!”)

  I could see the girl was nervous. I got her a glass of water and showed her samples of the gowns I was currently working on. Very quickly, she gravitated toward a great big pile of meringue—a dress that resembled a puffy summer cloud. In fact, it looked exactly like the wedding gown that the swan-thin model in our advertisement was wearing. The girl touched her dream dress and her face grew soft with longing. My heart sank. I knew this garment was not right for her. She was so small and roundish; she would look like a marshmallow in it.

  “May I try it on?” she asked.

  But I couldn’t allow her to do that. If she saw herself in the mirror wearing that dress, she would recognize how farcical she looked, and she would leave my boutique and never come back. But it was worse than that. I didn’t so much mind losing the sale. What I minded was this: I knew that this girl’s feelings would be wounded by seeing herself in that dress—deeply wounded—and I wanted to spare her the pain.

  “Sweetheart,” I said, as gently as I could, “you’re a beautiful girl. And I think that particular gown will be a bitter disappointment for you.”

  Her face fell. Then she squared her little shoulders and bravely said, “I know why. It’s because I’m too short, isn’t it? And because I’m too plump. I knew it. I’m going to look like a fool on my wedding day.”

  There was something about this moment that went straight through the heart of me. There is nothing like the vulnerability of an insecure girl in a bridal shop to make you feel the small but horrible pains of life. I instantly felt nothing but concern for this girl, and I didn’t want her to suffer for another moment.

  Also—please remember that up until this time, Angela, I hadn’t worked with civilians. For years, I’d been sewing clothing for professional dancers and actresses. I wasn’t accustomed to normal-looking, regular girls, with all their self-consciousness and perceived flaws. Many of the women whom I had been serving thus far had been passionately in love with their own figures (and for good reason) and were eager to be seen. I was accustomed to women who would shed their clothes and dance around in front of a mirror with joy—not to women who would flinch at their own reflections.

  I had forgotten that girls could be anything but vain.

  What this girl taught me in my own boutique that day was that the wedding-gown business was going to be considerably different from show business. Because this little human being standing before my eyes was not some sumptuous showgirl; she was just a regular person who wanted to look sumptuous on her wedding day, and who did not know how to get there.

  But I knew how to get her there.

  I knew she needed a dress that was snug and simple, so she wouldn’t vanish in it. I knew that her dress needed to be made of crepe-backed satin, so it would drape but not cling. Nor could it be a vivid white, because of her somewhat ruddy complexion. No, her gown needed to be a softer, creamier color—which would make her skin look smoother. I knew that she needed a simple crown of flowers, rather than a long veil that would—again—hide her from view. I knew that she needed three-quarter sleeves to show off her pretty wrists and hands. No gloves for this one! Also, I could tell just by looking at her in her street clothes where her natural waist was located (and it was not where her current dress was belted) and I knew that her gown would need to fall from the natural waist, in order to give the illusion of an hourglass figure. And I could feel that she was so modest—so mercilessly self-conscious and self-critical—that she would not be able to bear it if the slightest hint of cleavage was revealed. But her ankles—those, we could show and so we would. I knew exactly how to dress her.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” I said, and I quite literally tucked her under my wing. “Don’t you fret. We’re going to take good care of you. You will be a spectacularly beautiful bride, I promise it.”

  And so she was.

  Angela, I will tell you this: I came to love all the girls I ever served at L’Atelier. Every last one of them. This was one of the biggest surprises of my life—the upwelling of love and protectiveness that I felt toward every girl I ever dressed for her wedding. Even when they were demanding and hysterical, I loved them. Even when they were not so beautiful, I saw them as beautiful.

  Marjorie and I had gone into this business primarily to make money. My secondary motive had been to practice my craft, which had always brought me fulfillment. A tertiary reason had been that I really didn’t know what else to do with my life. But I never could have anticipated the greatest benefit this business would bestow: the powerful rush of warmth and tenderness that I felt every single time another nervous bride-to-be crossed my threshold and entrusted me with her precious life.

  In other words—L’Atelier gave me love.

  I could not help it, you see.

  They were all young, they were all so afraid, and they were all so dear.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The great irony, of course, is that neither Marjorie nor I was married.

  Over the years that we ran L’Atelier, we were up to our eyeballs in wedding gowns, helping thousands of girls prepare for their nuptials—but nobody ever married us, and we never married anybody. There’s that old expression: Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. But we weren’t even bridesmaids!! If anything, Marjorie and I were bride tenders.

  We were both too weird, was the problem. That’s how we diagnosed ourselves, anyhow: too weird to wed. (Perhaps that would be the slogan of our next business, we often joked.)

  Marjorie’s weirdness was not hard to see. She was just such a kook. It wasn’t only the way she dressed (although her sartorial choices were indeed patently strange); it was also the interests that she had. She was always taking lessons in things like Eastern penmanship and breathing up at the Buddhist temple on Ninety-fourth Street. Or she was learning how to make her own yogurt—and causing our entire building to smell like yogurt in the process. She appreciated avant-garde art, and listened to challenging (to my ear, anyway) music from the Andes. She signed up to be hypnotized by graduate students in psyc
hology, and underwent analysis. She read the Tarot and the I Ching, and she threw runes. She went to a Chinese healer who worked on her feet, which she never stopped talking about to people, no matter how many times I begged her to stop talking to people about her feet. She was always on some kind of fad diet—not to lose weight necessarily, but to become healthier or more transcendent. She spent one summer, as I recall, eating nothing but tinned peaches, which she had read were good for respiration. Then it was on to bean-sprout and wheat-germ sandwiches.

  Nobody wants to marry an odd girl who eats bean-sprout and wheat-germ sandwiches.

  And I was odd, too. I may as well admit it.

  For instance: I had my own bizarre way of dressing. I’d grown so accustomed to wearing trousers during the war that now I wore them all the time. I liked being able to ride my bicycle about town with liberty, but it was more than that—I liked wearing clothing that looked like menswear. I thought (and still think) that there is no better way for a woman to look smart and chic than to wear a man’s suit. Good woolens were still difficult to come by in the immediate postwar period, but I discovered that if I bought quality used suits—I’m talking about Savile Row designs from the 1920s and 1930s—I could trim them down for myself and put together outfits that made me look, I liked to imagine, like Greta Garbo.

  It was not in style after the war, I should say, for a woman to dress like this. Sure, back in the 1940s a woman could wear a mannish suit. It was considered patriotic, almost. But once the hostilities had ended, femininity came back with a vengeance. Around 1947, the fashion world was taken hostage by Christian Dior and his decadent “New Look” dresses—with the nipped waists, and the voluminous skirts, and the upwardly striving breasts, and the soft shoulder line. The New Look was meant to prove to the world that wartime shortages were over, and now we could squander all the silk and netting we wanted, just to be pretty and feminine and flouncy. It could take up to twenty-five yards of fabric just to make one New Look dress. Try getting out of a taxicab in that.