UPPER WEST SIDE — As Fashion Week rolls around, Silhouettes and Profiles at 71st Street and Broadway is doing a lot more than just hems and buttons.
Not only will the Upper West Side business be altering fresh designs from Jason Wu and Rodarte for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week starting Feb. 9, the shop will be restoring and modernizing classic vintage and antique clothing.
"We make very creative alterations," said owner Irene Tcherniakhovsky, who left a career as an architect for the fashion industry. "From the basic hem to very complicated tricky things."
Like the sewing machines in Silhouettes and Profiles, the bubbly Russian tailor never stops moving as she oversees her dozen staffers, visits with clients and transforms clothing.
With fashion week approaching, Tcherniakhovsky will likely pull 2 a.m. finishes as she adds floral details and beading to the yet-to-be revealed 2012 Winter/Fall Collections of Wu and Rodarte.
“We do a lot, a lot, a lot,” she stressed.
On a Friday morning she was hard at work on a satin-silk wedding dress from the 1970s that was partway through a transformation. A client wanted to wear the dress, passed down from her mother, on her wedding day.
"She wants a more sexy and strapless dress," said Anna Drugova, the 47-year-old manager of Silhouettes and Profiles. To hold the new design together, the simple dress would also require internal restructuring with added boning.
Another wedding gown, a turn-of-the-century number gifted from grandmother to granddaughter, was also in for alterations. With the slight size of ancestors, vintage and antique clothing can be a squeeze. This dress needed the addition of a five inch panel so the new owner could wear it.
"We are going to save everything," said Drugova. "Even the buttons."
A similar fabric to the century old weave would have to be painstakingly sourced so the dress could be bumped up a few sizes.
Lynn Hirschberg, the editor-at-large for fashion publication W Magazine, has been using the services of Silhouettes and Profiles for more than a decade.
"They can really reinvent things," said Hirschberg, who was picking up some altered dresses to add to the 120-plus garments in her wardrobe that already have the Tcherniakhovsky touch.
One of her items, a vintage print dress, had been modernized by removing the sleeves and a huge bow that was tacked to its front.
"It helps me feel like I am a designer in some way," Hirschberg said. She only wears vintage, but shies away from wearing classic clothing as a costume. Hirschberg prefers a look with a modern twist, which she achieves with help from Silhouettes and Profiles.
While at the New York Times Magazine, Hirschberg chronicled the restoration of a floor-length 1930s Chanel indigo gown for the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition on the French designer.
"Now perfectly restored, the dress could have been designed last week," she wrote in 2005 of Tcherniakhovsky's work. It was a 13-hour ordeal that involved salvaging a "severely frayed neckline" and replacing the net sleeves that were "gone altogether," according to Hirschberg.
Standing in front of her article that hangs near the entrance to Silhouettes and Profiles, Hirschberg had endless praise for the Chanel gown restoration.
"It was amazing what they did to that dress," she said.
