I just got mail from Uesa Robinson, who has a vintage clothes shop on Capitol Hill. She researches her clothes, and one of them is a dress that has a label from Perelucci’s, my mother’s (Gertrud Hodgson’s) clothes boutique. How marvellous! The Perelucci name and logo was my father’s, made out of my mother’s nickname Per and Lucy, her silent partner.
Was this dress her design? It may have been. There’s a second label in the dress that says “Dominique”. It looks like the kind of dress she would have sewn, with a dropped waist and tie. She sewed me several dresses in the early 70s that were a little like this. Some were cut on the bias, without pleats but with volants at the bottom, so they moved nicely, which was the whole point. I didn’t like ties, so I got a round or boat neck. Some dropped-waist dresses had a sash that tied round the hips. She experimented with her own fashion line and label, but it never got off the ground. I don’t know if the name she used was “Dominique” or not.
She also sewed the Perelucci label into clothes she bought in New York that she thought really fit the style of the shop. So who knows? Maybe she bought this dress. But I think it might be her own design.