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On The Mend

by Kent Steinriede

Susan Lunenfeld:

From Tables at Lickety Split to Designing Hell

While a student at Syracuse University, Susan Lunenfeld sold the clothes she made, though a future in the garment business was not in her plans. "I hated the concept of fashion", she says.

Back then, Lunenfeld worked in a tailor shop during the school year and ran a custom bikini shop in Provincetown, Mass. in the summer. She was only vaguely aware of the concept of high fashion, where couturiers dictated what women would wear. It took travelling around Europe and the Middle East for her to learn to love fashion.

Lunenfeld's serendipitous journey from custom bikini maker to eveningwear designer has taken her all over the United States and Europe, and put her clothing in stores around the world, on pages of magazines and on TV. Cybill Shepard wore a red dress of Lunenfeld's on the cover of TV Guide this spring. And Lunenfeld designed the jacket Fran Drescher's character wears in the cartoon opening to The Nanny.

After finishing college, Lunenfeld took some money she'd saved and went to Europe. Planning to spend just the month of September there, she ended up staying a year, travelling throughout Western Europe, Scandinavia, and Israel. In the Paris Metro, something clicked. Although she was running around Europe dressed in either jeans and a t-shirt, or a sleeveless Marimekko dress, she began paying attention to the clothes women were wearing. "They had a sense of something we do not have here", she says.

Later that year, in Israel, where she worked in a date factory, and on a kibbutz, Lunenfeld began to notice the clothing and jewelry of Bedouin women.

Returning to Philadelphia, after a year abroad, Lunenfeld started sewing and designing costumes for the "Theater of Living Arts" productions, including one that called for the actors to dress as green meatballs. After a season at TLA, she left and opened a dress shop on South Street, in the storefront that now houses the Knave of Hearts, selling clothes she designed and doing custom work. When the shop closed after a year, Lunenfeld went back to what artists call "The Golden Handcuff", waiting tables. One of the original waitresses at Lickity Split on South Street, Lunenfeld spent the next three years waiting tables at various restaurants around town.

Moore College of Art was preparing to send pieces from it's clothing archives to Japan to be displayed in department store windows. The college hired Lunenfeld to restore part of the collection of 18th and 19th century clothing. While working on the clothes, Lunenfeld became drawn to the antique lace.

Made from flax, a swatch of handmade Belgium, Italian or French lace could take years to complete. "I was mesmerized by it", she says. "I would literally go home and dream about it at night".

With Moore's clothes shipped off to Japan, Lunenfeld took off with a friend to France, to study French in Aix-en-Provence. What she found in Cezanne's hometown, would change her life.

For months, on her way to classes in Aix, she passed piles of antique clothing in the flea market that surrounds an old prison. Some of the piles of clothes contained items as old as those she'd restored for Moore, and they were for sale, cheap. Eventually, Lunenfeld quit school and bought as much antique lace clothing as she could with the money she had left.

She planned to return to Philadelphia, and peddle the three bags of clothing. "I didn't know if I had anything, or if I had just ruined my life", she says.

As she hoped, the antique clothing sold well-----so well that she went back to France to fill her bags again. She also began combing antique clothing stores in in New York, looking for clothes to restore and sell to boutiques.

With a partner, Lunenfeld opened an antique clothing shop at Third and Race streets. The partnership broke up but Lunenfeld wanted to carry on with the business. After visiting nearly every bank in Philadelphia, a small bank in Old City loaned her the money to reopen the shop, now called By Susan.

But Lunenfeld's sources were drying up as more and more people began dealing in antique clothing, driving up the prices. "By the 1980's" she says,"it was hard to get clothing". She took her best patterns and began making blouses with antique lace, which was still easy to find. "At the Boutique show in New York" she says, "people flipped out". She wrote orders to Saks, and smaller boutiques around the country.

By 1983, Lunenfeld was in the Rod owens showroom on new York's Seventh Avenue. By Susan, her company, had been launched on a single blouse, and showroom customers wanted new things. But as with the antique clothing, lace became hard to find. "I had to start designing" she says. "Before everything was based on antique patterns. I had to come up with someting new." She made a 1940's inspired 40's lycra evening dress. The dress was a hit.

Today, with five seasons a year, she has to design about 150 different pieces of clothing annually. Although she enjoys the creativity, designing is hard. "It's hell," she says."It's terrible."