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June 2001 Issue

The Dress of a Lifetime: A Talk With a Wedding-Gown Designer

By Aviya Kushner

When the bride walks down the aisle, most people focus on the bride--not the dress designer. But the designer's the one who put in the hard work. In fact, the designer has the big responsibility of making dream dresses for real people. "The biggest compliment I can hear is 'that¹s flattering,'" says successful gown designer Judd Waddell. And the second-biggest is: "simple elegance."

Despite the relative anonymity, Waddell knows he's designing what's probably the most watched dress of a woman¹s life. Waddell grew up in Illinois, far from New York¹s fashion center, where he now lives. Though his mother read many fashion magazines and was always interested in clothes, Waddell¹s life of building fantasy really got started in a college library.

"I was an architecture student at Washington University in St. Louis, and I was often in the art, architecture, and design library," since those subjects were lumped together, he says. "I'd be doing architecture projects and I¹d start glancing at the design books."

Waddell's eyes couldn¹t stay away from the section--"just a shelf, actually"--of fashion-design books. He kept coming back to that shelf, checking out those books and reading them, mesmerized.

He's still mesmerized. He designed the gowns for the 20th Century Fox production of The Object of My Affection, and he¹s appeared twice on Lifetime to discuss his designs. He believes a woman "should indulge the fantasy" when it comes to gowns, and he absolutely loves weddings.

"What's not to love?" he says. "Most of the time, these people are really right for each other."

Waddell is a real student of wedding gowns, a guy who thinks about fabric and shape and how they can help make fantasies come true. What's exciting about wedding dresses" is the scale of them--they're big dresses. I really like the architectural aspect of wedding dresses. They¹re usually quite 'built' from the inside out."

"It's more about listening to the fabric," he says, when asked what¹s flattering. "You also listen to people and what they have to say about the dresses."

Often, less is more, says Waddell. "I like to think the best designs are done with an eraser," he says. "I try to take away as much as I can, so there's a perfect balance of the elements."

In any dress, "proportion of any kind is key," he says. He tries to get women to try dresses they might not consider, just in case something surprising will look great.

"People need to try on dresses, and sometimes, the rules don't apply. People should look at themselves, but they should also look past their pre-conceptions," Waddell says. "Sometimes I say, 'I have a look that might be good for you'" in order to get someone to be more open.

Still, there are general guidelines. "I think people need to be really careful about their arms, " he says. "One of the most common mistakes is to have your arms covered. A lot of times it's more flattering to have strapless or one thin strap." Men often wear tight shirts to make their arms look bigger, and women also make their arms look bigger by covering them in tight fabric, he said.

And then there's what most people should show off. "Very few people have unattractive shoulders or clavicles," he says. It's also important to think movement. Brides tend to be "really sensible about getting dresses they can dance wildly in," he says.

But everyone's interested in looking good. Often, that's a matter of the right shape and style.

"Princess-line dresses are always the easiest to wear, because there's no horizontal line," he says. "However, there are some people who look great in a drop waist."

"A lot of times brides say "I don't want a full skirt because it will make my hips look big," Waddell says. "Well, actually, the opposite is true."

When pressed for more specifics, he said that "slim, A-line is for everyone, but sheaths are more limited." Interestingly, "the sheath is exactly the dress that will show that you have big hips if you have hig hips. There's no fooling."

"Sheaths tend to be my least favorite kind of dress," he says. "A woman has the whole rest of her life to wear a dress like that. When she gets married, she should indulge the fantasy."

And Waddell is still reading, and still immersing himself in the fantasy of fashion. "Three years ago, I found the book from college again--"Inventive Paris Clothes, 1909-1939", with Irving Penn photos. The photographs were beautiful, and the clothes are photographed in such a way that they speak for themselves."

Sometimes, of course, clothes speak too much. As a wedding guest, Waddell often has to "resist the urge to go flip the train," since usually, he's the one who's designed the dress.

"My best friend got married last September, and she actually made me the best man so I could do that," he said, referring to last-minute train adjustments.

"Thank God, I love going to weddings. They're so sentimental," he says. "I'm crazy about them."

Aviya Kushner is a poet and journalist who's based in Jerusalem. She can be reached at AviyaK@aol.com.

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