Lucy Gellman Photo
Wisdom in his studio.
New Haven’s most sartorially-minded can stop holding their breath for at least one big surprise in fall fashion: at Friday’s Design On9 “First Friday” showcase and fashion show in the Ninth Square, Neville Wisdom’s first standardized bridesmaid dresses will hit the runway.
Earlier this week, Wisdom took a moment to talk about the new line and his hopes for the show, weaving through bolts of fabric and plus-size mannequins in his Westville studio as he spoke.
Bottom line, he said: those dresses weren’t on his mind when he set up his 903 Whalley Ave. digs a year ago, or even when he established his Orange Street shop in 2012. When a gaggle of bridesmaids came through a few years ago, the designer didn’t think anything of it. They asked for alterations to their dresses. He worked his magic. The wedding they attended was beautiful, and that was that.
Or so he thought. Bridesmaids kept coming through the showroom with dresses that needed to be altered, and brought with them stories about “the horror that they experience overall,” Wisdom said. “How difficult it is to get the color they want, when they get their dresses and then they have to turn around and pay us quite a bit to make the dress fit them.”
Word got around that Wisdom was careful with the alterations, that he turned dresses that were blah into things the women wanted to wear. Wisdom then thought a step further: Flattering bridesmaids’ dresses, minimal with a little bit of flair, could be crowd-pleasing at weddings and then could be worn again, many times — dresses that weren’t just Wisdom-altered, but Wisdom-made, from start to finish. “We figured we might as well create our own,” Wisdom said. “That way, when the customer buys their dress, it comes custom fitted for them.”
Thinking a step further, Wisdom realized that adding a small line of standard bridesmaids’ dress to his collection could bring the price point down and the potential for meeting demand up. Opening a new computer-aided design (CAD) file on his computer, he got to work.
The bridesmaid dress models.
He clicked and scrolled his way through a tentative design. A cowl here. A sexy back there. A shimmering, swooshing ball gown of a skirt that could become something more demure upon request. He worked away into the night, banging out four variations. Then he took a deep breath, turned on the sewing machines, and made some more magic happen.
The dresses are based on a somewhat minimal design, with a fun Wisdom‑y touch: swooshy, stretchy crepe and a flexible color palette that distinguishes the pieces from something one might find at a big-box department store or bridal shop. From four sleek prototypes, already spun into size-four reality — cowl in the front, cowl in the back, short or long skirt — bridesmaids can mix and match, putting together a dress that is all Wisdom, and partly their own.
The swatches from which one can choose a bridesmaid dress color.
The bridesmaids’ line gels, he said, with a goal he has had since opening the 63 Orange St. shop four years ago: to “just make women feel beautiful.”
But it’s also bigger than the dresses themselves. At $275 a piece — that’s Wisdom’s price point for most of the dresses in his collection — the gowns underscore his autumnal mantra of wasting less.
And wasting less is achieved through those tech assisted, CAD-rendered dresses, intended to cut down radically on the amount of extra material that every piece uses.
A showpiece destined to be revealed on Friday night hangs in the shop as a sort of proof that Wisdom is moving in that direction. It floats in the air across from an orderly row of almost 30 sewing machines (the company only has 31, most of which have eco-friendly servo motors and live permanently at the Westville location). It is a deep velvet with splashes of bright color, and it is 100 percent CAD-designed.
“We’re trying to get as eco-friendly as we possibly can,” Wisdom said. “When I designed the business for the expansion to keep manufacturing the clothes that we sell, it was with the hopes that we can expand even more in the future to a full-on manufacturing place.”
The first all-CAD designed dress.
Wisdom said there are a few more surprises for Friday, all with an eye toward the importance of his customers in everything he does. In the past year, he has launched a Kickstarter to add more examples of “clothing made for every body type” to his line, which generally showcases clothes UK size 4 to 18 in-house (he is adamantly against vanity sizing, and will readily make something for a woman larger than size 18 or 20). He is trying to raise money for curvy, realistically-sized mannequins. He’s thinking differently about how much he designs, how he designs, the colors and fabric he uses, and what his customers think of the “fabulousness” reflected in his work.
Or, as he put it, they — with both their purchasing power and input — are having a say in the future of the brand.
“What can I say?” he laughed. “We’re biased toward our people. They support us, and we love them.”