Living in New England, it isn’t always easy for a fashion designer to showcase his or her work. If you’re a local designer, where can you put your work on show outside of the usual holiday fairs and art shows? As a buyer, where can you find out about designers and view their work? What options do our local designers have in growing their businesses beyond their studios, tiny shops or living rooms? There are, of course, local fashion weeks in the area. And charity fashion shows are held often. But what about the principle means by which people shop these days – shops, catalogs and websites? How can local designers reach out? A local fashion show may result in an order from a local boutique but that doesn’t happen as often as it might. Websites for tiny businesses, done professionally, are expensive to build and maintain, and catalog production – from hiring the photographer right through to distribution – is often beyond the reach of small businesses. There are adverts, of course, in local papers and magazines such as this one, and these can be more accessible. But beyond the cost of placing the ad, there’s the cost of the photographer, model or models and the processing. Also the venue: where can a designer go to get a great setting in which to show off their work? Not every outfit suits a background of city streets!
Living here in New England we are lucky to have plenty of options in the landscape about us – our beaches and parks. We are also steeped in history and have many buildings that have come down to us from centuries past – some of poorer provenance than others but all beautiful. They are often both informative and moving places to visit. In particular are the houses of famous writers who lived in the region, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and last but not least, Edith Wharton, to name but a few.
Many of these homes have been museums for some time. One of the last to make this transition was Edith Wharton’s spectacular house in Lenox, Massachusetts: named after her Grandfather’s house, she called it ‘The Mount’. Wharton’s relocation to France and her inherited wealth – though most of her wealth during her lifetime came from her writing (she wrote, for example, ‘The House of Mirth’, ‘The Age of Innocence’ and also, in her capacity as designer and interior decorator, with Ogden Codman, the still influential ‘The Decoration of Houses’) – put many Americans off her work and meant that for many years her books were more highly regarded in European circles. But in recent years that has begun to change and at the heart of this transformation lies the work that has been done at The Mount. After considerable restoration the buildings have been turned into a place where people can visit and rediscover Wharton. The Mount became open to the public only in the past decade but it has been making up for lost time.
Wharton’s friend, the author Henry James, called The Mount “a delicate French chteau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” The influences on the house’s design, however, were as much American, English and Italian as French. Based upon the English seventeenth-century Belton House with its H-shaped footprint, grand staircase and cupola – all designed very much in the classical style – The Mount’s Italian influences can be seen in the long outdoor terrace with its opulent staircases leading to the gardens, its grotto-like entrance hall, the long gallery on the second floor, the terrazzo floors and the statues and furnishings. Colonial American influences are reflected in the inclusion of the lawn as a key piece in the layout of the gardens, the large striped awning over the outer terrace, the New England green shutters and the regularity of the overall design of the house. There are even fake windows on the house in certain areas so as not to interrupt the overall symmetry of the outer walls!
Edith Wharton lived at The Mount from 1903 to 1908. Against her wishes Edith’s husband Teddie (thought to have suffered from manic-depression) sold the house in 1911 and it changed hands several times as a private house before becoming a girls’ boarding school, the Foxhollow School, in 1948. It remained as a school until 1976 after which it fell into disrepair. In 1978 it was rescued by Tina Packer of the theater group Shakespeare and Company. Finally, the Edith Wharton Restoration company took control in the late 1990s. During the past decade they have been working to return the house and gardens to their original glory. The accuracy of the restoration is especially poignant as the house was very much Edith’s house – she had the place built to her own specifications and the gardens landscaped to her own designs. She also paid for it. The Mount’s happy ending is that it has become a must see destination for anyone visiting the Berkshires and is open for the season from May through October.
The Mount is the perfect place for a photoshoot and the Edith Wharton Restoration Company was eager to help out when we mentioned that local designers could benefit from a chance to get some publicity shots in such a beautiful location. We selected four local couture designers to create one or two designs. As you can see from the photos shown here, the results as photographed by local photographer Earl Christie (www.earlchristie.com), were phenomenal.
Kelsey Bacon, the director and principal dress designer of Bedagi Fashions (www.bedagifashions.com), based in Sunapee, New Hampshire, specializes in prom, cocktail and evening dresses. Bacon went for a classic long evening gown of satin and organza with a long side split and central tuxedo zebra print bow to bring it up to date. Earl Christie shot the dress against the backdrop of the long gallery on the second floor as if it were Wharton herself coming from the library beyond to greet friends arriving in the courtyard below. Privacy was of paramount importance to Wharton and she designed the entrance of The Mount and the manner in which she would great her guests with than in mind: instead of walking into the house and encountering a grand staircase from which your host would descend to greet you (a concept which Wharton hated), at The Mount a guest walked first into the first floor grotto with its stucco walls designed to resemble that of pouring water and then, when so invited, through the glass door on the right, up the winding stairs and into the long gallery where Wharton would be waiting.
Barbara Poole (www.bfelt.com) is a painter and designer who works primarily with felt. Poole designed two dresses for us. The first, a short cocktail dress, was inspired by the whimsical details that are sprinkled throughout The Mount, such as the heart-shaped hooks in the guest rooms or the mother-of-pearl buttons for the servants’ bells. Poole made this blue felt dress from silk and wool using a process known as nuno felting. (Nuno is a Japanese word meaning ‘fabric’.) The dress is very easy to wear, perfect for a spring or summer party.
Poole’s second design, her longer, form-fitting evening gown and jacket (the dress has exquisite bodice work detailing in the back) was inspired by the warm colors in the library – colors created by the books, the tapestries (now paintings) on the walls, the oak bookshelves and the green marble fireplace. The flower neck-piece that accompanies this evening gown was inspired by Wharton’s joy in bringing the indoors and the outdoors together. The library, for example, this most warmly decorated of rooms, opens on all sides to the terrace, the long hall, Teddy’s den and to the drawing room next door. Wharton was a huge proponent of removing clutter and elaborate drapes. She wanted to be able to actually open her windows.
Celtic Dragon Dress Designs (www.celticdragondressdesigns.com), based in Framingham and run and owned by Julia Ebel, designs dancing costumes for troupes and individuals across the country. For her gown design Ebel went for an extraordinarily sensual piece that uses eight virtually uncut yards of robin’s egg blue silk. She drew her inspiration from the decoration and design of Wharton’s dining room, quite possibly the lightest and airiest room in the house, and her gown certainly filled the pale pink and white high-ceilinged room with sophisticated simplicity and color. Like the dress, this room is unique. It is diametrically opposed to the damask-heavy dining rooms that could seat large numbers of guests in other great houses of the period. The dining room at The Mount, as with Wharton’s dining room in New York, could seat only eight because, as Wharton expressed, “there are but eight people in the whole of New York whom I care to have dine with me.”
Our fourth designer, Meredith Ionelli, started as an intern at Celtic Dragon Dress Designs. Inspired by the classical form of the house, with a nod to the fresh thinking and modern outlook that also governs the space, Ionelli created a tightly fitted, almost tweed-like woolen skirt, pleated in the back, paired with a light chiffon top and an orange taffeta sash: combining both the practical and the feminine to create an elegant line. Earl Christie shot the dress against the backdrop of one of the Italianate paintings in the drawing room where the colors in the dress chime perfectly with their setting. Wharton would have approved. Her house is the epitome of balance, symmetry and good proportion, looking simultaneously to the future and back to the past.
“It was only at The Mount that I was really happy,” Wharton wrote years later when she was living in France. She was rightly proud of her achievement in creating her house and gardens at Lenox. So too can these designers feel proud of their work, which they carry out often with much commentary about the fact that their work is not as good as that which can be found in NYC and LA. “There’s no couture in New England,” the head of one of Boston’s modeling agencies said recently. Against the idyllic backdrop of this New England writer’s home, we feel we have proved him wrong.
