DESIGNER IN NEWS

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32633, 15 June 1971, Page 7

DESIGNER IN NEWS

(Newsweek Feature Service)

Alongside the familiar greats of high fashion— Dior, Chanel, Givenchy, St Laurent—the name •‘Priscilla of Boston” seems as out of place as a turnip in a crepe suzette.

For every detractor in the profession, though, Priscilla has at least one admirer. “Priscilla is not a little old lady sitting in a bridal shop doing ante-bellum skirts,” Monica Hickey, of BergdorfGoodman, once said. “She’s with it.”

In private life, Priscilla of Boston is Priscilla Kidder, a trim, soft-spoken blonde of 52 who clearly knows her business. Her Charlestown workshop is studded with newspaper clippings and framed pictures of her Presidential weddings. She maintains two highly successful shops: the Snooty Fox, now moving to suburban Boston, and the Brides’ Shop, her

first store, which is filled with fat cherubs, turquoise and gold furniture and the lilting rhythms of Muzak. Certainly, Priscilla of Boston’s headquarters are not what many people would expect of an elegant house of haute couture. She works from an 1880 brick foundry and her creations are stitched together by dozens of seamstresses hunched over rows of sewing machines and formica work benches. But if there is ever a designers’ hall of fame, Priscilla of Boston should be in it, because she has created the bridal gowns for more famous American weddings than anybody in the world. Her first celebrated bridal client was Grace Kelly, and her latest Tricia Nixon. In between, Luci Baines Johnson. Julie Nixon, Barbara Eisenhower, Heddy Roosevelt, Peggy Goldwater and Bob Hope’s daughter-in-law have all walked the aisle in Priscilla of Boston gowns. And for good measure, she I also created the dresses i Tricia, Julie and Pat Nixon wore to Tricia’s engagement party. CRITICS To be sure, not everybody in the world of high fashion considers a Priscilla of Boston the last word in nuptial finery. “Women’s Wear Daily” has taken swipes at her gowns. And Priscilla herself has noted, in her quiet, Boston way: “People have said fashion couldn’t come from Boston, and that Priscilla’s too much of a New England name, too quaint But I don’t mind. Pm proud to be traditional.”

Her dresses range in price from a modest $9O up and, as an extra fillip for her customers, she is always ready to provide tips about the right things to do in the church or at the wedding reception. But for the famous, one of her most priceless virtues is her ability to keep a secret. As she once again demonstrated before Tricia Nixon’s wedding, the most persistent reporter could not pry the design of a wedding dress out of Priscilla of Boston. “Brides—important brides,” she has said, “don’t want to see their dresses splashed all over the place.” To reporters who asked about the Nixon dress, Priscilla would only say that it is “very beautiful,” that the basic idea was her own and that "Tricia added her own flourishes.” “Mrs Nixon knows our quality is excellent, admires it and shares our taste in clothes,” she added. “The Nixons have great confidence in her,” Priscilla’s assistant, Janet Shute, confided. EARLY START Priscilla Kidder was bom in the smoky city of Quincy, Massachussets, where, at 17, I she opened a tiny 'yam shop

specialising in knitted dresses for old women. Then she moved on to the big R. H. White store in Boston, becoming an assistant buyer in the bridal department. “At 19, I was earning $lO,OO0 —a fantastic wage for that time,” she once boasted, “and I earned a bonus, too.” During World War II she married James Kidder who had been a star goalkeeper on the Harvard hockey team and who now looks after the business operations of her company. It was after the war that Priscilla opened her first bridal shop. “Everyone had been wearing their mother’s old gowns up to then,” she recalls. “There were only about three major stores that had bridal shops.” “We have always given the customer what she wanted,” she says. “We project fashion in a very gentle way. We have never gone far out but have always given them the pretty look, the appearance that everything belongs. And they remember us. Mothers and daughters have worn our gowns.” It is little wonder. Anybody who can please a Roosevelt, a Johnson, an Eisenhower, a Nixon and a Goldwater clearly deserves to be remembered.