A Bit of a Hidden Secret

Designs by Rowena Gill

Did you get an engagement ring for Christmas? If so, you are probably already busy visualizing all the details of a spectacular wedding day. And central to that day will be your dress.

The dress is the bride’s crowning glory, a statement of her individuality. What better way to illustrate that unique quality than to wear a dress specially designed just for you? And who better to help you realize that goal than British designer Rowena Gill whose studio is located in the bucolic village of Millbrook?

For Gill, the joy of creating a bespoke gown lies in discovering the distinctive characteristics of her client and then translating those ephemeral qualities into a gown. “A bespoke gown is a big part of one’s self-expression,” she said. “It is an extension of who we are and what we would like to express.

“I love every type of body. Thin or large, it’s all about them,” she continued. “This society is so about being thin but I don’t believe in that. The beauty of people is in their character and that’s what you want to capture.”

Clearly, then, when the designer meets a new client her first task is to find out about her new patron. She spends time with them, discovering what they do in life, their likes and dislikes, their innate style.

“I’ll ask them to bring pieces they like so I can get an idea of whether they are outgoing and extravagant or more conservative. We start talking about the event they are going to, where it will be, what time of year, outdoors or indoors. I pay strong attention to the role that they will play in the event. After an hour or so, I start sketching. I love this challenge. I love to understand people and make the perfect dress for them.”

Before moving on to the selected fabric, she makes a muslin approximation of the dress, adjusting it as needed. Using the muslin dress, she creates a pattern to use for the finish fabric. “There will be a few fittings,” she said, “because the fabric translates a little differently. There’s usually a fitting for the muslin and then another two for the dress. Obviously, if it is a big ball gown there would be a few more.”

She has been satisfying clients for decades including such celebrities as Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, Sharon Stone, Naomi Campbell and Pamela Anderson. And her work has been commissioned by top fashion houses such as Yves St. Laurent, Emmanuel Ungaro and Christian Lacroix. But two decades ago she made a conscious decision to step away from the world of international couture and to become “a bit of a hidden secret” in the hills of New York.

“I have no desire to hit the roads in Manhattan,” she said firmly. “Having decided to be done with the jewelry world, I made a conscious decision not to run after the big dream.”

Instead, she has dedicated herself to making evening and wedding gowns as well as tailored suits for fashionable people in the tristate region.

Gill had an almost magical beginning to her career. As a student in France, where she studied fashion as a teenager, she was walking along a street in Paris one morning when she saw something sparkling in a dustbin. Looking more closely, she discovered a box of antique glass beads. An older man approached her and said he had discarded the box while cleaning his attic. He told her he had more if she wanted them.

It was the beginning of an illustrious career creating bejeweled necklaces, chokers, bags, belts and dresses. It was this jewelry that fueled her meteoric rise in the fashion industry when she first came to the United States.

As she explains it, she came to the U.S. for “love and work.”

“I want to California when I was 22,” she explained. “My boyfriend had gotten a job in Palo Alto and I went out there to be with him. He said if I was going to stay, I had to get a job. So he bought me a ticket to New York and found a place for me to stay in Harlem. I was terrified. I caught a taxi and said to the driver, ‘Please take me to a nice place in Manhattan.’”

The driver decided that Soho would be the best place for her purposes. “I was walking the streets with all my boxes of stuff,” she related. “I saw a jewelry store that I thought might like it. I went in and a man said, ‘You’re so late. Just go in. They are waiting for you.’ I was so scared, but I went in and just put out my stuff. A woman came in—she turned out to be the buyer for Saks—and she bought the whole lot. I went out and called my boyfriend and said, ‘I’ve done it. I hate New York and I’m coming back.’ He said, ‘You can’t have!’ and I said, ‘Look at the fax machine.’ The orders were just rolling in.”

It was a fairy tale beginning but she admits “I wasn’t prepared.”

She stayed in San Francisco for five years before returning to London after 9/11 “I had a shop behind Harrod’s but it was sad just doing jewelry,” she said. “I was trained in making clothes

So I started doing private commissions. Then an old friend who lived in Manhattan asked me to come and live with him. He had friends in Millbrook and we moved upstate together and I started making clothes for the society people around me. I had been bitten a few times by corporate life in America and I wanted to scale back, so I was fortunate.”

Now she is pursing the sense of craftsmanship she lost to the corporate years. She revels in working in fabrics drawn from around the world and turning them into garments that reflect the specific tastes of her patrons. “When people get to a certain age, they know what they love and what quality is,” she said. “I know their bodies, and I want them to be as at ease as possible. Sometimes they will come in and say, ‘I know that this is below you, but I want it to be nicely made and I love to do that.”

She is particularly fond of working on the bias because the fibers become more elastic. “If cut properly, to the woman’s shape, it is so flattering,” she said. “It literally flows like water. Every single woman that I have cut a garment for on the bias has looked like a million dollars. It’s an amazing feeling and they move with such confidence.”

Not every fabric can be cut that way, however. “Certain fabrics have their own properties,” she said. For instance, duchess satin taffeta, one of her favorites, is more sculptural. “You have to play with the fabric to get the best elements to come forth.”

No follower of trends, she nevertheless admits to a penchant toward bias dresses in the style of the 1930s and ‘40s.

“You don’t really see big ball gowns now,” she said. “Vintage is the massive thing right now.”

She points to Beatrice, the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, as a shining example of this trend. “She wore her grandmother’s dress, which I thought was spot on,” she said. “That is the direction we should go. I had a family come in with a 200-year-old heirloom piece. We took it apart and put it together in a new design of our day but with the fabric of the old days. I do enjoy things like that.”

Rowena Gill can be reached at 845-214-5470; rowenasgill@yahoo.co.uk. Her studio is located at 24 North Avenue in Millbrook NY.