Читать книгу Gypsy Wedding Dreams: Ten dresses. Ten Dreams. All the secrets revealed. - Thelma Madine - Страница 6

As a dressmaker, it’s my job to know which are the biggest trends in the fashion industry. I think everyone knows that the one dress that has had the biggest impact on popular culture in recent times is the Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen dress designed for Kate Middleton’ s marriage to Prince William on 29 April 2011. And yet the one dress that I have never, ever been asked to copy for a traveller wedding is that very same dress.

They might not always dress to your taste or mine, but there is no denying that the traveller community have their own sense of style and it’s completely uninfluenced by what might be driving looks on the high street or in high fashion. It’s incredible, really. These days you can hardly open a magazine without finding an image and an accompanying article telling you what a style icon Kate Middleton is, but the gypsy community has been left entirely untouched by her taste, despite several of them coming to me every week and telling me that they want to look like a princess. Yes, the traveller girls dream of being a princess for a day, but they definitely do not wish to be a princess in nude patent leather courts! Really, it’s hard not to admire this when you see a million others copying Kate’s style, but what always fascinates me is what does actually influence them. Travellers don’t go to clubs like other girls, they don’t see the same websites; they don’t really read fashion magazines, preferring the fantasy worlds of colouring books and dolls. And some of them cannot read so they are totally unaffected by advertising or fashion talk in magazines. Not one of them has ever come in and asked me to make them look like a pop star – we have had the odd Lady Gaga-influenced request but never anyone wanting to look like Katy Perry or one of The Saturdays. Instead they see shapes and colours that they like, and that’s what leads them to make the decisions for their special day.

As time passes, and I’ve seen more and more brides come through the doors at Nico, I have come to realise that what these girls are looking for is not a dress but a costume. They don’t want to look like the most beautiful version of themselves on their wedding day, they want to look like someone else entirely. Nothing should reflect their normal day-to-day lives or chime in with any sense of style that they might usually stick to; they want to take on a different personality entirely, to be something ‘other’ than usual, not ‘better’.

Sometimes the girls want to use brands that they associate with wealth, such as Swarovski, Christian Dior or Baby Phat, but sometimes it’s just brands with logos that the girls like. In the past we have been asked to incorporate brand names or logos onto the wedding dresses themselves, but we always try and change them a little so as not to infringe copyright. I don’t think the travellers really want to persuade people that those are the brands they’re wearing; they just want to make the point that it’s where their taste lies. One of our biggest requests is for the exotic pink wedding dress from the 1980s Eddie Murphy film, Coming to America. It might seem like a bizarre reference but if you look closely, that dress, with its gold headdress and huge pink swagged skirts, is something truly spectacular. I have made ones like that for weddings, proms and First Communions – it’s an all-time favourite.

One of the other inspirational superstars as far as these girls are concerned is Barbie – but not just any old Barbie, really specific ones. Where non-traveller girls might idolise ‘Safari Barbie’ or ‘Swimming Barbie’ – you know, the Barbies who actually do something – the traveller girls focus on two classics: ‘Bridal Barbie’ and ‘Barbie of Swan Lake’.

Neither does much beyond looking pretty and they don’t come with any kit or accessories, unlike some of the more action-focused ones, but both wear really traditional, floaty ballgown-type dresses.

The traveller girls play with Barbies a lot when they’re little and they also spend a lot of time drawing them, even when they get a bit older. When small cousins and sisters come into Nico with their older relatives – perhaps if they’re going to be bridesmaids or even a mini-bride (see Chapter 3) – they always seem to have colouring books with them, and often they’re Barbie ones.

Now we all know that Barbie’s proportions are not normal, they’re cartoonish, but it’s that extreme femininity that the travellers go for – a tiny waist with the corset pulled in as tightly as possible, boobs as high as they can go and huge hips created by my now-famous skirts are the order of the day. These days, I almost don’t trust a traveller girl if she says she just wants a slim-fitting skirt!

I am frequently surprised to see that some of these girls don’t have automatically pointed feet just like Barbie when I’ve finished getting them ready for their big day.

Perhaps as a result of all this colouring-in, I often get really creative designs sent to me from the brides-to-be. It’s not unusual for them to have been keeping a little scrapbook of images for years, so when they come to place an order for their wedding dress they will bring in their own sketches of how they want it to look, complete with directions on what fabrics they want to use or how the skirts should hang.

I love seeing those images as they give me an idea of what is driving the girl’s dreams, who she really wants to be on the day and how I can help her to be that person. Sometimes I can even work out where a bride’s priorities lie just by looking at how firmly the pen has been pressed into the pad in different areas on the page – there’s nothing like direct access to a customer’s original idea to help create the perfect dress.

But there’s one brand name that influences designs even more than good old Barbie: Disney. Every time there’s a new Disney heroine out in the cinema, I make it my business to check what she looks like as I know I’ll be making versions of her gown for the next couple of years. Since my own little girl Katrina was born eight years ago, I often find myself taking her to the cinema for a ‘treat’ only to head down there with a sketchpad and pencil, keen to see what the lines on the dresses are.

After one Disney film came out Katrina was given a Disney doll, but I stole it to keep in the office for showing brides. It was too good to resist, and has proved every bit as useful as I’d hoped in helping to explain ideas to traveller girls!

The most recent Disney production to make a big impact was The Princess and the Frog (2009). That film led to us making one of our most memorable wedding outfits ever. Everyone wanted ‘Princess and the Frog’ dresses that year. From the month the film was released I was inundated with images printed off the Internet of the now-familiar green-and-pastel-toned dress. It’s a gorgeous gown, with folded petals around the bodice and big swooping skirts – a real fantasy look. But there was one traveller girl who wanted her entire wedding to look just like the movie, and that was Joleen Quinn.

Joleen first came to see me just before the film was released. It was before My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding had aired so the shop was much quieter than it is now and she just walked in and got an appointment there and then. She was a lovely girl – very dark, with striking features and gorgeous big green eyes. I immediately warmed to her as she seemed to have a lot on her plate, with lots of younger brothers and sisters around her that she was keeping an eye on. Despite this she had a real air of calm about her; she was lovely and mild-mannered.

‘Your time will come soon,’ I remember her saying to one of her little sisters, who was watching everything with great big saucer eyes, transfixed by all we did. Visibly excited, she grinned back. I imagine her own scrapbook of ideas is filling up nicely now.

That first time, Joleen was stuck on a Spanish theme for her wedding. She ordered a pink Flamenco-style dress with a very tight-fitting bodice and a huge train. Full of ruffles and Latin detail, it would have been extremely dramatic. The plan was for a 22-foot train with 40 3D sparkling lilies cascading down the back of it. She was to be accompanied by eight bridesmaids and four page boys between the ages of six and two. And her mum was to have a dress made by Nico as well. Everyone in the bridal party would match the Spanish theme to spectacular effect. This was a big order and they were going all out.

What usually happens after this initial meeting is that we draw up sketches of what was discussed with us in person. These are a combination of the girl’s original plans and our input regarding what’s technically possible as well as any other ideas that may have come up when the customer became inspired by the atmosphere and details in the factory. Leanne is great at these sketches. Not only can she draw what seem like incredibly intricate dress designs at the bat of an eyelid, she also has a wonderful eye for detail too, making the girls in the sketches have gorgeous floaty hair and dramatic sweeping eyelashes. We send these to the bride-to-be and her family then wait to hear back about any amendments that need to be made to accommodate either their taste or budget. After this comes the request for the deposit to make sure they’re really serious. Then, a month or two before the wedding, we start making the gown.

At the beginning of every week we have a meeting to discuss what we’ll be working on next in the factory. Sometimes we come across a folder for a girl that we haven’t heard from in a while, or maybe a girl for whose gown we haven’t even had a deposit. That’s when the queries begin.

Such was the case with Joleen. When it came to looking at her file again, we realised that we had not heard from her in a long time. It’s not that unusual for a girl to go quiet for a while – after all, these people lead lives dictated by travel – but this seemed odd. She had first come in to see us in October with a view to her wedding being the following March. Now it was January and we needed to know whether to get going with Joleen’s dress or to abandon the plans; we were just at the point of abandoning hope of ever hearing from the girl again.

To be honest, I had given up on her and was really only humouring the team on it. As far as I was concerned, either this girl had gone with another designer or love’s path had not run smoothly for her.

Without telling Leanne or her mother Pauline (who is also my ever-trusted manager at Nico), I took the folder out and put it to one side. After all, it had been a year.

I didn’t throw it away, though, as we always keep the files. Some girls have different reasons for not wanting to marry: the groom gets locked up, family finances fluctuate, travelling gets in the way. They are, after all, travellers. In the meantime the latest Disney film had come out, but none of us had seen it. I’d been promising Katrina but we’d not made it yet.

Then, one sunny January morning, Joleen and her family appeared in the shop again. It was as if nothing unusual had happened at all. There was very little explanation as to where she had been but that’s sometimes how these things go so I just went along with it.

‘It’s all changed, Thelma,’ she told me with a smile.

‘Oh right, has it now?’ I replied. ‘I suppose you want something really fancy this time’ was what I wanted to say but I bit my tongue instead.

‘I’ve seen the new Disney,’ she explained, ‘and now I want a Princess and the Frog theme.’

‘OK,’ I replied. ‘We can do that – of course we can, love. Let’s get Leanne and her sketchpad, shall we?’

‘Is that OK, Thelma? Is it really?’ she excitedly asked.

‘It’s fine, it’s up to you,’ I replied. ‘You can have it if you want.’

It really wasn’t a big deal for us – we are used to dealing with a bit of change and I know things are often unpredictable, so I took a deep breath: it was going to be a long day. They had brought a lot of children with them, who looked as if they had plenty of noisy toys that they were looking forward to playing with. At this point Joleen pulled a whole load of colouring books out of her bag and started to show me pictures of the Disney images that she wanted her dress to look like. There were stickers on one side of the page and line drawings ready to be coloured in on the other; key images had been printed off the Internet and stuck around the pages of the colouring book too.

I couldn’t have been more right about that day being long. They talked and talked, going over the new plans again and again. In fact, the young kids made so much noise and distraction that not long after that visit we began to tell people that they couldn’t bring small children with them as we don’t insure for them to be in there with the machines whirring and bolts of fabric everywhere. It just started to make me uneasy, the number of kids we’d sometimes have running about – I didn’t want anyone hurting themselves because I hadn’t spoken up.

Now the wedding dress had changed from pink to white. The skirts and the shape of the dress had changed too – very Princess and the Frog. And different types of diamanté were being brought up. It was all getting a bit out of hand. I got the feeling that the girl needed a few firm boundaries if colours and dates were starting to change this much.

‘Listen, love,’ I said. ‘All of this is fine, but you’ve not paid anything beyond the deposit yet and there’s a lot of change happening here.’

I looked at her mum. ‘You’re going to have to reassure me that these really are the plans now. We’re not going to be able to actually start making this dress until you pay a bit more of the fee.’

‘No problem,’ said the mum, straight away. She seemed very relaxed about everything – in some ways, a little bit too relaxed.

She was an absolutely beautiful woman – she could have been a model, she was so statuesque – and she had a real natural beauty. But she did not seem especially bothered by her role as a mum. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen such a set-up but this particular mum was almost slightly off-hand about the kids, leaving it largely to Joleen to keep an eye on them. It was as if she’d done her years of hard graft, she still looked good and she wanted to enjoy herself and her moment of looking fabulous as the mother-of-the-bride.

You’ve got to remember these women are not ‘mothers-of-the-bride’ in the traditional way that we would recognise them – they are women in their mid-thirties, who have married and had kids very young. They’ve put in a couple of decades of hard graft and now they’re sitting back for the party season.

While we sat there in the factory, Joleen was running round keeping an eye on the kids while Mrs Quinn worked through a selection of no fewer than four potential mother-of-the-bride dresses with me. Initially she had planned something very Spanish, with an almost entirely see-through corset to match Joleen’s original Latin theme. That dress would have been very elaborate and highly coloured in parts. Then there was talk – for some time – of an ivory dress. It seemed she had a kind of tribute bridal dress in mind. I raised my eyebrows, a little, but went with it. After this there were more changes and then she struck on her final idea.

At the time there were a couple of magazines in the factory that one of the girls had been flicking through during her lunch break. In one of them there was an article featuring a selection of celebrity wedding dresses, including Cheryl Cole’s gown from her wedding to Ashley. Straight away, this particular dress caught Mrs Quinn’s eye.

‘Ooh, now I’d love something like that!’ she exclaimed.

‘OK,’ I replied.

‘It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? And she’s such a stunner!’

‘Yeah, it’s a great dress,’ I agreed. I had always liked that dress – it was glamorous without being too flamboyant.

‘Which bit of the dress do you think you’d like to be the inspiration?’ I asked, wondering if it would be the fitted skirt, the wide train at the back, the way that the skirt kicked out at the bottom or the strapless corseted bodice with trails of sequins working their way down from the waist across the fabric.

‘The dress,’ she said.

‘I’m not sure what you mean, love.’

‘I’d like my dress to look like that one,’ she said, her face totally deadpan.

‘What – the whole dress? You just want a copy?’

‘Yes please, love.’

And sure enough, she did. She wasn’t interested in being inspired by the new Mrs Cole, she wanted an actual replica. I’m not sure how I would have felt if my mum had turned up on my big day dressed as one of the most famous pop stars in the country, but things are different in the traveller community, and this mum was determined to look her absolute best. And there seemed no lack of love between the two of them. We promised to do as good a version as we could for Mrs Quinn before turning our attention back to Joleen, who had been happily minding the kids for all of this time.

By the end of that day, plans for the new version of the wedding dress were shaping up to be spectacular. It was to have more diamanté on it than any other dress I had done at that stage. There was a lily pad 3D flower – sitting just off her hip, where the corset met the skirt – to further reflect the ‘Princess and the Frog’ theme, and then there were curling leaves coming down the skirt from the waist. Initially these leaves were to be edged in diamonds but soon plans were in place for them to be entirely filled in with crystals. The flowers were to be 3D, as were the tendrils flowing down her body, so that they were filled out and curling in different directions, standing out from the bodice and skirt. The colours were now white and silver, with huge diamanté sections. Sparkles would be provided by the Swarovski ‘Aurora borealis’ – the most expensive type of gem we use. These special crystals display different colours depending on the light and the way you look at them. They have to be ordered from Swarovski or a Swarovski agent.

It was going to be a real statement wedding. But then came the biggest statement of all …

‘And then for the Frog Prince outfit—’ Joleen began.

‘OK,’ I said, wondering where on earth this was going. Could I even make a ‘Frog Prince’ suit?

‘I’d like my fiancé in it,’ she said.

I nodded slowly, desperate to take her seriously but equally sure that no traveller man would ever go along with this. There’s no way I’m even going to cut out the fabric for this idea, I thought to myself.

‘He’s a big fat ugly thing,’ interjected the mum. ‘A suit like that would be wasted on him!’

It was hard not to laugh.

‘But he’s my Frog Prince!’ protested Joleen.

‘Are you sure he’ll wear it, love?’ I asked delicately.

After all, the suit in question comprised a little cape, silver sequined epaulettes on the shoulders and an old-fashioned high collar with three diamanté fastenings down the front of the pseudo-medieval jacket. As for the trousers, they were a sort of bloomers. Both the jacket and trousers had ruffles on the cuffs. It reminded me a lot of the kids’ clothes I used to make on my old market stall but it was not, one might say, the most masculine of outfits for the modern man.

But Joleen seemed sure about it, so I had a look at some more pictures with her and made notes. I was wondering how the hell I was going to make anything wearable out of the situation but I knew I had to make her dreams come true.

Not long afterwards, Joleen called Nico.

‘He isn’t going to wear it …’ she began.

I could not say I was surprised.

‘… But I still want the suit there at the wedding, to complete the theme.’

‘OK, love – but how are you going to do that?’ I asked.

‘I want you to make it for my little brother,’ she explained. ‘He’s a page boy and he’ll be there with me, so he can be my Frog Prince.’

‘Well, I suppose that outfit is a little kinder to a small boy than it is to a grown man,’ I said, relieved to know I wouldn’t be making something that would never be worn after all. Joleen was really determined to have all of her Disney characters at that wedding, no matter how bizarre it might have seemed. And I have to say, it’s still one of the most memorable weddings I’ve ever made outfits for.

When they sent through the pictures of the wedding day itself we gathered round and cooed at how fabulous they had all looked – even though the groom was just wearing a standard morning suit. Joleen’s little brother looked gorgeous in his Frog Prince suit – a real cutie – and her mum was as statuesque and sexy as we’d anticipated, a real archetype of a woman.

Joleen herself was glowing, thrilled to have got her theme together just as she had imagined. She was absolutely delighted with the results we got for her and couldn’t thank us enough.

After that wedding we took loads of orders for similar designs, both for weddings and First Communions. We’ve done about 50 of them now, and that’s just in a couple of years. The First Communion dresses in particular are adorable in that design – the young girls look so cute and they’re so influenced by the bigger brides; they’re always thrilled when they’re allowed this.

Seeing Joleen plan that wedding, and the way that her relationship with her mother and her siblings worked, really helped me to understand why these brides choose the dresses that they do.

Yes, the community is very small so they have to fight harder to stand out in the competition for a good husband, but it’s more than that. Very often these girls – who are still only in their teens – have already been looking after younger siblings for years, having left school at around 11. Joleen’s life at that point was a really hard graft. She had already been a mother for years, and I could see why becoming a wife so young seemed like an attractive option: she wanted a break. Then the cycle begins again: the girls get married, have children of their own and work hard until the younger ones can start taking over again. By the time they’re 40, it’s back to living it up again.

But these girls have so much to do at home when they are in their mid- to late teens that the idea of being a princess for a day is all-consuming.

It’s what they’ve dreamt of while they’ve been cleaning and feeding the kids and doing whatever else needs to be done. They’re living adult lives but with little idea of what kind of adult they’re going to be.

This process of trying on dresses and chopping and changing back and forth between princesses and fairies and ballerinas and Barbies is not just to do with the look on the day, but with trying on different personalities.

It’s a case of ‘Which me do I want to be on this day?’, ‘Who says most about my dreams and the woman I want to become?’

Often the dresses they choose are not based on real women but blank slates with no real story behind them, precisely because it gives them a bit of space to imagine their future selves.

They don’t have the chance to find themselves a career, go travelling and try out a few boyfriends before deciding what kind of a woman they plan to be – they do it while choosing their dress, which is why I always do my very best to be patient and respectful during the process, even if some of the ideas do seem a little unusual at first.