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.
I’ve got very little to complain about at Nico, but every now and again we have a bride in who really pushes us to the limit. Lateness, disorganisation, even chaos with the finances … these, I can deal with. But some girls really are a nightmare. And for them, we have ‘The Book’. There is no actual book – it’s more of a list that we keep in the office that has on it the names of people we will never work with again: the ones who simply aren’t worth the trouble, those who have been unforgivably rude or simply wasted too much of our time.
Ashleigh Monaghan is the best example of this, as well as being the exception. Because despite her being in The Book, we still ended up making her wedding dress. It all began with her engagement dress, which we did not meet her for. Flamingo pink, it was for a July engagement. It came in two pieces: a halterneck, with leaves all the way around her neck and collar, and then a short skirt with a long train at the back. She had 3D roses all over it – wired up so that they didn’t sit flat on the dress but stood out to make a stunning dramatic statement.
But she was pressure: every day was pressure. Ashleigh wanted more and more from us, and we’d give her more, but then she didn’t want to pay for it. She would snap at her mum, she would shout at us if she didn’t like our answer and then she would be on the phone at all times of day and night. I had Ashleigh and her mum on the phone, both pleading from different angles sometimes. Even though we never met her then, she still made it into The Book. Not formally, but we had marked her as difficult from the very beginning.
That engagement dress was an absolute stunner. We had girls come into the factory while it was being made or before it was sent off to her and they actually cried when they saw it. Honestly, they were that sad it wasn’t their dress, their idea, that they burst into tears. I’d never had that before and I was glad that at least someone was getting pleasure out of the dress because by that stage Pauline had started to take all the phone calls in the factory, lying that I was either out or busy – I couldn’t take any more. Over the years she has got pretty good at those fake calls – ‘She’s