‘Well, we just have to make sure we don’t do her wedding! If she behaves like that over an engagement dress, we’ll never hear the end of the wedding.’
There had been talk of a wedding dress while we were negotiating the engagement dress. She wanted us to do it – sometimes people say they are going to use us for their wedding dress so they can get some gloves or a couple of extras thrown in on the engagement dress – but she was quite sure that she wanted to use me. But this time I stayed quiet; I just kept my mouth shut whenever there was talk of ‘the next dress’, for my sake and the rest of the team.
Some months later we received the measurements and a drawing for a wedding dress order through the mail. This wasn’t entirely unusual because sometimes travellers are literally travelling while they’re planning a wedding and can’t make it to the shop for a first fitting. If they’re very sure of their size – either because they’ve had one of my dresses before as a bridesmaid or for a party, or because they’ve been fitted in the past – and their dream design, often they just trust me with the rest. In with the usual selection of crank mail and bizarre charity requests, we’ll get a scrap of handwritten paper that is in fact an entirely serious order. If I’ve worked with a bride that the family might know and they’ve seen that I get it done how and when I’ve said I will, they don’t worry as much about meeting me.
Often I’ll get the design – sometimes just a basic drawing and lots of description – along with the measurements, and we’ll get back to them with our finished suggested design, this time drawn up properly by Leanne or me, and a quote. It’s pretty simple once you’ve done it a few times, and it can save a lot of time and drama with some brides!
In this case, the order – together with an initial sketch of the design – came from a woman whose name we had not heard before, but she seemed very organised and familiar with the process, so none of us thought to question it. There was no need to make a fuss where one wasn’t needed, we thought.
The inspiration was Barbie of Swan Lake, with diaphanous fairy wings on the upper arms and a similar design flowing down over the large underskirts beneath; it all looked very delicate, very floaty. We sent back our drawings and an estimate of the cost. At this point there were no names mentioned, apart from that on the envelope.
The deposit arrived straight away, with no problems at all. A few weeks later I was chatting to the mother, confirming price details of some alterations we were making to add to the dress, when she said: ‘That’s the thing – the engagement dress was so spectacular that we all feel under pressure to make this one even better. It has to top the engagement dress, and that’s no mean feat.’
‘Really, love, who did the engagement dress then?’ I asked, confused why she was putting me under so much pressure.
‘You did, Thelma,’ came the reply.
My blood went cold and I completely froze as I realised who I was talking to. There was no question about it. It was that girl – the one we had sworn we would never work with again.
Once the conversation had ended I turned back to the rest of the team, my head in my hands.
‘How the hell have we taken this order?’ I asked.
The girls said it couldn’t be her, but I knew it was. We all sat round and tried to work it out.
‘It can’t be her,’ said Leanne. ‘It’s not her name on the order.’
‘It’s her,’ I said. I was annoyed, we were in too deep: she had paid her deposit and it was a dress we knew we could do a good job with. We had to do the dress. How had we not known it was her?
It was only later that I spotted in the files that the mother had used her name to place the wedding dress order rather than use Ashleigh’s name, which would have been usual. None of us had remembered the mum’s name from the engagement order as she was very mild mannered, and so many travellers have the same surname that we really only refer to brides by their first name and the design of the dress – for example, ‘Cherry girl’ or ‘Shell girl’. That’s all we write on the files until we’ve got to know the bride and her family a bit better.
We really would have said a flat-out no, had we had realised it was Ashleigh. Not because we disliked her but because she was so relentless. But we’d made an agreement, and we’d taken the money, so before long we were busy making the dress. And, as I’d feared, we were quickly doing five times more work for that one gown than for any other customer. The phone calls, the negotiations, the questions, it felt all-consuming, and it made me protective of the rest of our customers – it wasn’t fair that their experience was being infringed upon because of one girl making a huge fuss. Even bearing in mind the years I have spent dealing with the traveller community and all their quirks, this was way beyond anything we could cope with at Nico. It wasn’t a tradition I didn’t understand, it was pure mayhem.
Part of the reason why it became such a huge saga was that Ashleigh wouldn’t talk to me directly. She would call – several times a day – but put her mother on the phone while she was in the background, yelling. I could have had a straight conversation with her and got it out of her what she wanted a bit faster, but that wasn’t how Ashleigh wanted to do things. So I had to deal with her mother trying to ‘translate’ what she wanted. It was never, ever a simple conversation.
They’d always start in the same way: ‘Ooh, Thelma,’ her mother’s now-familiar soft voice would say, ‘What she’d like is this, love.’
I would start to reply when I’d hear her shouting in the background; she thought we didn’t understand her, we were trying to make her unhappy, we were ganging up on her.
All the while she kept adding things onto the dress. The mum would phone up and say, ‘She wants these 3D Hawaiian flowers on here, here and here.’ It was as if Ashleigh would go to a wedding, see someone with something on their dress and then she would decide she wanted to have a bit of that on her dress too. Every time she went to another wedding, she’d want to add something from it as well. She wanted to outdo all of the other girls’ dresses by having something of theirs on her dress.
She went to one wedding we did a dress for – a beautiful-looking kid, a completely different dress to anything we’ve done before – and first thing in the morning she was barking instructions down the phone.
‘She’s seen Melissa’s dress,’ her mum said. ‘It was out of this world, outstanding, so handsome. Is our dress going to be better than that?’
‘Well, she paid more than you,’ was my answer. I was at the end of my tether – I take pride in my work and the work of the team here. We really didn’t like being doubted so it was as much as I could offer.
Having said that, Mrs Monaghan was always charming to me, no matter how Ashleigh was behaving in the background. She would always ask how I was; despite the demands, she was lovely to deal with.
And Ashleigh herself was a sweetheart – when I got her direct. It was only with going through the parents that things got silly. The first half of every phone call I’d be thinking, she’s OK, really, I shouldn’t have been so hard on her. But then she’d turn and the pressure would start.
She was just a 17-year-old girl and I was infuriated by how she’d get a rise out of me. At one stage she decided that she would like an extra 29 3D flowers added to her dress. Those flowers use almost an entire bag of crystals each – they are expensive but, more importantly, they are heavy. And she wanted them attached to the most lightweight of the sheer pieces of fabric that she had flowing down the top of the skirts.
Pauline called her and started explaining to her mum that there was no way we could do that for her unless we went seriously over the budget we’d been given and it would also put the delicate