by Jess McCuan / photos by Rimas Zailskas

KEEPING ASHEVILLE IN STITCHES:Lucille Neilson in her Merrimon Avenue shop, The House of Fabrics. Lucille Neilson hasn’t bought an outfit from a store since sometime in the 1950s. Since then, she’s made all her clothes using material from her own store, the House of Fabrics, which has been in business on Merrimon Avenue in Asheville since 1969. At 83, she’s seen a fair number of fashion trends come and go—beginning with polyester, the fabric that fueled her business for at least a decade.

She can remember the day the business took off, and to her dismay, she wasn’t very well dressed for it. She and her husband Alan bought a building on Merrimon and wanted to put a business in it, thinking an auto-parts shop could be just the ticket. But after Lucille stitched together a dazzling polyester suit for a neighbor’s wife, the neighbor decided the three of them should start a clothing business instead. One morning while Alan was traveling, the neighbor arrived at the Merrimon building with a truckload of fabric, and before Lucille could change out of her sweatpants, people started showing up to buy it. “I called Alan and said, ‘Get home—we have got a business going big,’” she recalls. It was the end of the auto-parts idea but the beginning of the House of Fabrics, which still employs Alan, Lucille, their daughter Angie Heatwole and five seamstresses.

Peggy McLure teaches sewing classes at the shop.Lucille has repaired blue jeans for Robert Redford, fashioned costumes for movie actresses and assembled a funky suit for the lead singer of the British rock band Jethro Tull. At the store’s peak, her seamstresses made some 300 wedding dresses a year. But that was in the days before she competed with chain fabric stores like Hancock’s, chain wedding-garb stores like David’s Bridal and, more broadly, with a dwindling national interest in sewing and a steady influx of cheap foreign-made clothing. “In the ‘70s, everybody could sew,” she says matter-of-factly, sitting in a parlor on her shop’s top floor, wearing a bright yellow silk jacket she made to look like one of Oscar de la Renta’s. “We grew up around [sewing], and it was ingrained in our systems.”

At Neilson’s age, it would be easy to sit around and reflect wistfully on the shop’s best bygone days. But she seems to survey the shifting business and fashion landscape with the unsentimental eye of an entrepreneur. When a fabric is hot, she orders as much of it as her regional suppliers will deliver, a policy that has served her well for nearly four decades.
In the beginning, there was polyester. Polyester fabric, which is more likely to melt than burn and is made from the same raw material as a plastic water bottle, had plenty of qualities that made it a good fit for fashion. It doesn’t wrinkle like cotton, it doesn’t mildew in the washer or shrink in the dryer, it’s often cheaper than cotton and it’s much cheaper than, say, silk. Best of all, she notes, it’s easy to sew with. “Polyester is very forgiving,” she says. “Once you started sewing with it, you could make three dresses in a day.” In the ‘70s, some Asheville fabric shop owners turned up their noses at it, thinking it was inferior to natural fabrics. But it was available at Neilson’s shop, often in mass quantities. She says a now-defunct West Asheville factory manufactured a thin lightweight polyester that you could make a washable prom dress out of, so she did. Anyone in Asheville looking for custom-made polyester dresses knew exactly where to find them.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, her biggest sellers were wools and silks. The natural fibers have always sold steadily, but in the ‘80s, she recalls making many women’s suits out of DuPioni silk, frequently made from threads of two different colors, and Pendleton wool, manufactured at a mill in Oregon. You name it, the House of Fabrics sold it, and Lucille Neilson could make a suit from it. She figures she has made thousands of suits in her lifetime; her own closet alone is full of hundreds. And yet somewhere in these years, Neilson and her family saw clothing prices in department stores plummet, making clothing so cheap that, rather than repairing old garments as they had done before, more people simply threw them out and bought new ones. This meant she kept up a brisk tailoring business, since off-the-rack clothing rarely fits. “People are so aggravated with what’s in the stores,” she says. And yet they seem to have forgotten how to make it themselves.

(from left) Angel Dawson, Lucille Neilson, Amy Birch Ostwalt and Christal Foreman, all wearing outfits made with fabric from Neilson’s store. Until now. Sewing has apparently skipped a generation. Perhaps Baby Boomer women, intent on getting jobs and generally casting off the domestic habits of their mothers’ generation, simply chose not to learn how to sew. But for whatever reason, their daughters, now in their 20s and 30s and taking cues from retro trends or the do-it-yourself craft movements, have suddenly taken an interest again. Neilson and the seamstresses teach weekly sewing classes in the upper floor of the House of Fabrics, and they are full of 20-something Asheville women who like knitting and crocheting and are looking to make their own clothing better and cheaper than they can find in stores. Peggy McClure teaches a skirt-making class with an unusually high number of women in their 20s. “A lot of them are still in school, but they want to learn to sew,” she says. More often than not, younger women want to use a line of vintage-inspired fabrics by Amy Butler, an Ohio entrepreneur who gets rave reviews in national magazines for her funky flower- and paisley-patterned fabrics that double as interior decorating material. Last Christmas, Neilson noticed people making aprons out of Amy Butler’s retro material, and a few women asked if House of Fabrics could teach a special apron class. “I thought—aprons? Who is wearing an apron these days?”

Whatever their motivations, Neilson is grateful that young women have taken up sewing. “We don’t care who they are, really—we’re dying to tell them about it,” she says. It keeps her business alive, and second, it’s energizing for her to talk shop with up-and-coming local designers like Brooke Priddy in West Asheville, who stops in to buy material for her stretchy dresses—though Neilson notes that her own approach to sewing, usually starting with a pattern, is yards away from Priddy and other modern designers’ “draping” method. Neilson still sews, loves the TV show Project Runway and believes that, among all the hobbies, jobs and general activities available to women these days, sewing is still one of the most confidence-boosting, creativity-inspiring skills a woman can learn. “Sewing is something that mesmerizes you,” she says. “Once you make one thing, you’ll want to do everything that comes along.”