By Stefan Hard
The Sunday Rutland Herald & Sunday Times Argus, May 9, 1999, pg. E1

They're not like the hundred other wedding dresses hanging on racks in Debbie LaFromboise's bridal shop above Church Street in Burlington.

As soon as LaFromboise puts one of the antique bridal gowns on a dress form and straightens and smoothes the white or cream fabric adorned with fine lace or beads, something happens.

First, a smile breaks out on LaFromboise's face and stays there, uninterrupted by her excited speech, as she fingers the vintage fabric with tenderness and carefully buttons up the back. Then she stands back and looks at the garment as if it were, right now, inhabited by a bride. For her, the past has come alive in her hands. Her eyes widen with delight.

"It's soooo romantic," she says, her eyes rolling up, then sideways as if slipping into a dreamy state.

LaFromboise has made restoration of vintage wedding dresses a specialty since she opened her business, Sewly Yours, two years ago.

She once thought restoration might be only a fun niche portion of her bridal business, but it's proven to be a passion, and one in high demand by her customers. Of the 150 wedding dresses she typically stocks in her shop, one-third are antique gowns, some of them dating back to the late 1800s.

"It's great. So many of the young women who come stop when they see the antique dresses in the showroom when they come up the stairs, and then when they come into the shop, they just get drawn to the vintage wedding dresses right away," says LaFromboise. Turn-of-the-century-style dresses are the most popular, especially since the showcasing of such formalwear in the blockbuster romantic film "Titanic." The antique bridal gowns range in price up to $1,500.

LaFromboise gets her vintage wedding dresses from dealers or individuals, or she finds them herself. But for her, the most fun comes when a young bride-to-be walks into the shop with her mother's or grandmother's wedding dress and wants to know if it can be restored or modified for her own wedding.

"These are my favorite customers-someone who comes in with an antique dress because they appreciate the history behind it, because they love the fact that Mom saved it all these years, and they want it to be part of their wedding," she says.

"A dress LaFromboise is currently working on has been worn by two generations and will grace a third this summer. To meet the latest bride's wishes, LaFromboise is converting the early-1900s dress, which originally had a high neckline, into one with wide shoulder straps for a cooler feel and a more revealing, modern look.

The passion and skill LaFromboise shows for restoring old garments comes largely from her own grandmother, Ardelle Wells of Shelburne. When LaFromboise was only 5, her grandmother would give her a piece of scrap fabric and show her simple techniques for making wraps and skirts. The tutelage continued with more advanced skills as LaFromboise grew up.

The vintage dresses come to her in all conditions. Some are well preserved and need only a gentle cleaning. Some are badly creased from being folded and packed for so long, and smell of mildew. Others are stained, decayed, torn and missing buttons or lace. Then LaFromboise has to clean more thoroughly and work some of her needle magic.

"I clean everything at home, by hand, in my bathtub," she says. "The process is a secret, but I can tell you I use a mild handwashing soap and a non-chlorine powder bleach."

LaFromboise searches literature for hints on how to clean vintage fabrics, and she's received valuable advice from the Shelburne Museum. Some techniques she reads about sound too risky to try, such as using the juice from boiled rhubarb for removing red wine stains.

At Sewly Yours, LaFromboise won't give a customer an estimate for restoring a dress until she sees how well it cleans up. Some stains disappear, but some won't and require that the piece of fabric be removed from the dress. Some fabrics and threads will change colors after cleaning.

Usually, LaFromboise's restoration efforts go well, but just once, a cleaning turned into a disaster. A beautiful beaded dress with silk satin sleeves that LaFromboise bought at an antique shop cleaned up well but then, when she hung it up to dry, broke down. "It shredded. It was a disaster," LaFromboise says, laughing. "Thank God it wasn't a dress for a client."

When parts of a dress won't restore to their original beauty, LaFromboise is ready. She buys some old dresses just for parts, cutting fabric, lace or buttons off them to bring other dresses back to life.

Sometimes the material needed to replace fabric or to fashion new elements can come from the original dress. A grafting of fabric from a full skirt or long train is often sufficient to make alterations.

In most cases, LaFromboise has to increase the girth to fit modern bodies.

"Brides used to be thinner…before the days of McDonald's. I rarely get a bride that zips right into a vintage dress."

LaFromboise says she has never turned anyone or any dress away.

Only rarely, the best she can do with a tattered dress is to transfer one or two elements of it onto another garment.

Like the quality and craftsmanship of the antique furniture she restores at home, the quality of the vintage dresses impresses LaFromboise.

"The handwork in these old dresses is incredible. I mean, this lace was all done by hand," she says, showing off a cream-colored turn-of-the-century silk charmeuse dress with an abundance of elaborate cotton lace. Then, bringing out a simple but elegant satin dress from the 1930s, she raves about the hand-blown glass beads that decorate the fine netting of its illusion neckline. "You'll sometimes see inside seams of a sleeve stitched over with lace," she says.

One of the most unusual vintage dresses she has taken in was one made just after World War II from a silk parachute. The groom, a paratrooper in the war, wanted his bride to wear his parachute on their wedding day. With no one to hand the gown down to, the owner recently sold the dress to LaFromboise and gave her a wedding photo to go with it. It may be one of the best-made dresses in her shop, with its ultra-strong fabric and wide, quadruple-stitched seams.

LaFromboise draws the line at the days of disco, when cheap imported wedding dresses started flooding the market. She usually won't bother with restoring dresses made after the mid-1970s; she says their quality often is so poor she can't work with them.

It's not just the old dresses that make LaFromboise's restoration experience so enjoyable. She says it's the people, too. Clients who want her to restore their mother's or grandmother's wedding dress show an appreciation of the past, and a care for detail with their wedding plans that makes LaFromboise want to work even harder to make everything perfect.

A recent client who had elements of her mother's dress worked into her wedding dress wrote to LaFromboise after the ceremony: "I loved telling people where the buttons and the lace and the material came from, from (my mother's) dress. I think that my mother loved seeing her gown become part of my gown."

LaFromboise even ventures that a customer's desire to preserve and honor the past by wearing an antique dress might transfer favorably to her approach to marriage.

"Those kind of people are just better people at taking care in what they do."