FASHION Magazine

French shoe designer Christian Louboutin has always loved cabaret; growing up in Paris, he would sneak into the famous Folies Bergére during intermission and steal empty seats. (He later interned there, fetching coffee but dreaming up shoes for the dancers). Though he obviously went on to launch his own globally known shoe line, he never […]

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By Olivia Stren

I’m in wedding empress Ines Di Santo’s Toronto boutique, fondling a frothy, aisle-long expanse of Chantilly lace, Italian silk and doppia faccia (double face) Italian satin—a decadent marriage between peau de soie and taffeta. “It feels like orchid petals,” says Di Santo, caressing it. “To know a gown, you have to feel it,” she tells me in a seductive rasp. “How do you know the man you’re going to marry? You have to feeeeel him. The same goes for a dress.”

We sit on a gold-framed divan, the kind of perch that looks designed for fainting, nibbling on petits fours or getting fanned by manservants. There are no men here, though, and one gets the sense there never are. Di Santo’s couture dresses—also for sale at New York’s swish Bergdorf Goodman department store—are lavish, theatrical scene-stealers redolent of the designer’s childhood in Buenos Aires during the 1950s and ’60s. “I remember going to the theatre with my papa and a handsome actor pulled up in a Rolls-Royce, and I thought, ‘Everybody should always look like that—fancy,’” she says. Her first fashion show in Toronto was appropriately dramatic; she rented Casa Loma and had a tiger escort her models down the catwalk. “I see beauty everywhere,” she says. “My husband tells me, ‘All I see is a rock, and you see what it would look like drizzled with rose petals.’” She tells me what she saw when she first saw me: “I see a New York night wedding at a glamorous restaurant and you in a long Chantilly lace gown.” (I’m getting married during the day at City Hall in San Francisco in a knee-length cocktail dress.)

Di Santo is, she explains, in the business of making dreams come true. But I was never one of those girls who dreamed about her wedding day. I’m sorry to add that it was by no means because I was focused on more virtuous or sensible pastimes; I just preferred to view marriage as an ending, rather than a beginning. So thoughts of the Big Day, freighted with the suffocating weight of Forever, were generally wed to a bridal party of neuroses; the festive theme of my outlook was summed up nicely once by actor Jeff Bridges, who said about his marriage: “I thought it was a giant step toward death.”