Driving to work last year, I fell in love with a dress on display in the window of a small boutique.
Dark green, with a fitted top, a flattering neckline, and an elegant flared skirt, it evoked the classic style of the 1940s while looking entirely up-to-date. It was elegant, it was beautiful and it radiated style.
I never got around to visiting the shop. But I never forgot it. So when the chance came to interview the shop’s owner and dress designer, Elaine Bernstein, I agreed right away. And when better than now, when we’re shopping for Yomtov?
Bernstein’s shop feels like an atelier, a sliver of white space in Highgate Village, with the clothes on rails, and changing areas behind screens; understandable as it started as a pop up.
She’s often there serving customers herself, an important part of the process, as everything can be customised to fit perfectly. Buttons can be added or taken away, waistbands moved, the back bodice shortened or lengthened, hem lengths altered. All the work is done at her manufacturers in Tottenham — once measurements are taken, it’s made for you. It’s not quite bespoke tailoring, but the next best thing.
Bernstein herself is tiny — “Four foot, eleven and three quarters!”— and it’s immediately clear from her fresh and pretty, dark blue linen sundress, that these are not styles that absolutely demand height and a boyish frame. This is perhaps why so she has so many Jewish customers, as often we tend to the short and curvy. But anyone of any age, craving clothes that actually fit, in this season of over-sized floatiness, should take a look.Especially if you have a taste for the vintage styles, which were their inspiration.
Bernstein comes from a rag trade background. Her grandfather, Harry Bernstein, created the Hershelle label back in the 1930s, and her father, John took over in the late 1950s, adding the Young Mayfair label. Bernstein and her sisters grew up in and out of the business, she recalls models parading in the latest styles in the showroom to buyers. “And at the end,” she says, jumping up to demonstrate, “there would always be a final turn — like that!”
The sisters were dressed beautifully by their father, “It mattered enormously to him that we looked good.”
But when she went off to boarding school for sixth form, disaster struck. “It was a mixed boarding school, full of rugby players, and there was always lots of food. I ate and ate and ate, and of course I put on weight.” Her father carried on buying clothes for her, but she didn’t like the way they felt, or how she looked. “They were beautiful clothes, but you needed to feel self confident in your body, and I didn’t.”
She went off to Goldsmiths College to study French and German, in 1979, where she felt out of place. “It was quite grungy, and I was wearing all these beautiful clothes that my father had bought me, real ‘look at me’ clothes, and no one else looked like that.”
Later, working in advertising sales, she felt just as uncomfortable in the shoulder-padded office suits of the 1980s.
It took the tragedy of her father’s death when she was in her twenties, to change things. Grief meant that she lost interest in food, and lost weight without thinking about it. Being thinner meant she felt more confident to develop her own style. She shopped in charity shops for vintage clothes which suited her. “I was interested in the creative adventure that dressing up can bring,” she says.
She also explored new career options, doing courses in stand up comedy, radio journalism and teaching English as a second language. She did stand-up for a year, enjoying the audience reactions, but didn’t feel it was her vocation. Then she attended a weekend course run by the Landmark Forum, a chance to search her soul, challenge her assumptions and work out what she really wanted from life. She realised she’d always lacked confidence, partly because her father had once described her as “unemployable”. He’d meant to be helpful, wanting her to have secretarial skills to help get a job, but she’d taken the words to heart.
She started selling vintage clothes on e-bay, helping older women to off-load designer clothes from years gone by. One client had so many beautiful clothes that Bernstein took a stall at a vintage fair to sell them. She loved dealing with customers face to face and eventually became a regular at Portobello market.
She saw how regular customers customised their finds, and from that, she got the idea of adapting 40s styles and making them herself.
She found a pattern cutter, and made a small black dress, then tested it on family and friends and made changes to make it feel more modern— no shoulder pads, for example, and shorter sleeves. She uses polyester crepe, which is less expensive than the viscose crepe of the 1940s, but has the same fluid feel. This dress became her staple, and others followed — a button- through swingy sleeveless number, and a gorgeously sleek jumpsuit, for example.
Her instagram and website is full of pictures of customers clearly thrilled to bits with their buys, and wearing them at weddings (including their own), presenting the news, meeting royalty and just enjoying life.
The garments aren’t cheap — between £215 and £285, depending on the alterations— but you’re paying for something that’s the opposite of throwaway fast fashion. And — a crucial detail— every one has pockets.
Hearing Elaine Bernstein’s story is rather moving. Someone who struggled with her confidence, who didn’t know if she’d chosen the right career, has reached the point where she has a job that she loves, and a mission to pass on that feeling of joy and confidence to her customers.
She’s also found a place in the Jewish community where she feels happy and involved, as a member of Belsize Square Synagogue.
“At last,” she says with a beaming smile, “I feel as though I’m doing exactly what I should be doing.”
69 Highgate High Street, N6 5JX
