Dreamcoats

by Patricia McLaughlin

[PHOTO caption][I. Pearl in one of her swingy jackets. Photo: I.Pearl Fashion]

Ilene Pearl makes the coats of her dreams—and maybe yours. It has to be her sixth or seventh career so far . .

I. Pearl in one of her swingy jackets. (Photo: I.Pearl Fashion)

Ilene Pearl’s bio doesn’t really fit the genre. For one thing, she was 57 when she took the plunge. She’d worked as a hotel manager, fundraiser, university administrator, manufacturing executive, etc., and so had developed a range of skills and insights that most 18-year-olds don’t have. She’d also learned more about apparel than most people pick up from shopping.

Pearl grew up in St. Louis, where both her grandparents worked in the industry, her grandfather as a tailor, her grandmother as a coat finisher. Shopping with her grandmother was an education: Everything would be turned inside out, each seam and hem and interfacing scrutinized to be sure it was properly executed. So Pearl learned to notice and to judge details of construction.

Even better, her grandmother, who could make anything beautifully, was happy to make her any garment that caught her fancy, in any fabric she liked. So she learned to love beautiful fabrics, and learned how different ones behaved, and which ones worked best for which sorts of designs. She also learned what flattered her, what felt right, what worked.

But much as she loved the game of putting styles and fabrics together, she says, it never occurred to her to pursue it as a career. People like her grandparents had come from “the old country”—in their case, a place on the Polish-Russian border that changed hands so often its residents could never be entirely sure for very long what country they lived in—and had worked in the garment industry so that their children could have better lives, and their grandchildren could go to college and enter a profession. So Pearl got a degree in psychology from Washington U. and became a teacher. Then, after a while, she worked in management at the Chase Park Plaza, the city’s grand old hotel. Next she worked for the St. Louis United Way, and then for Washington U. She moved to Philadelphia to take a job in development at the University of Pennsylvania and, after several years, moved on to the Philadelphia Orchestra.

By now, she was in her 50s, her son was launched and she was ready for a change. What did she want to do with the rest of her life?

She says people kept telling her: “What you want to do for your career is find something you absolutely love, and then find a way to make a living doing it.”

But what?

All along, she’d continued to dress as she always had—falling in love with a great fabric, finding the perfect style for it, and then finding someone to make it for her—which is basically what a fashion designer does. But she did it for love. She loved foraging in fabric shops, window shopping for new ideas, flipping through fashion magazines.

It only occurred to her to try doing it for money one day when a good friend came to work in a new jacket. The friend loved it—it was elegant, it was comfortable, it was versatile, it worked with jeans or work clothes or even for evening.

Also, Pearl noticed, it was a simple cut. Wouldn’t be hard to make. Would suit many body types. She went to New York to shop for fabric, and started looking for a small production house within easy reach of her Bucks County, PA home.

She says nobody told her that, at 57, she was too old to start a career as a fashion designer. She wouldn’t’ve believed it anyway: She says she’s always been out of phase with her age cohort. “I didn’t marry until I was 38, had my first child when I was 43…”

She started iPEARL with that first jacket, made in “a wonderful upholstery fabric” that “hangs beautifully and wears like steel.” She took it into an upscale local boutique and got an order on her first try; the jacket sold out immediately.

When the recession hit, instead of approaching larger stores, she stayed small, doing trunk shows at small high-end boutiques and galleries, first on the Philadelphia Main Line, then reaching out to St. Louis, Chicago, and beyond. For a blissful year, her coats were sold at Takashimaya, the elegant Japanese department store on Fifth Avenue—until the company decided to close its New York store in 2010.

She uses luxury fabrics like cashmere, alpaca, boucles and metallic brocades, and loves strong colors—tangerine, banana, violet, turquoise. Many of her coats—see for yourself at www.ipearlfashions.com—are inspired by fabulous coats she remembers: coats her grandparents made for her beautiful mother, coats Grace Kelly wore over her ballgowns. Some are styles she grew up with: “swing coats and balmacaans, things that were classic, that always stayed in style.” Invariably, they’re lined in colorful silk prints, and the seam allowances are bound in bright contrasting color.

She designs them not only for how they look, but for how it feels to be inside one: “When a woman puts on one of my pieces,” she says, “you can almost see the effect in the way she twirls, the way she stands.” Wearing one of her coats, you could sweep into a room if you wanted to, instead of merely walking into it.

“I love swing coats,” she says, and when you look at hers you can see that she appreciates their dramatic potential—and also understands that women with hips like them because, with a swing coat, you get to buy a coat that fits you in the shoulders.

Which is probably not something your average 20-year-old designer-wannabe would notice right off.

The other thing Pearl has going for her as a newcomer to the business of fashion: She isn’t in it for the glitz and glamour and limos and after parties, isn’t longing to be famous, hoping to hobnob with celebrities, dreaming of going to garden parties at Ralph Lauren’s house and barbecues at Diane von Furstenberg’s.

She already has a life, and a husband, and friends. She’s making coats because she likes the work. She loves the process, the doing of it—even if it took her a long time to discover it.

Patricia McLaughlin is a Philadelphia-based Universal Press Syndicate columnist writing on fashion and style trends. Her “RealStyle” column appears each Sunday in 100 newspapers across the United States and Canada. Patricia last contributed to