Reportage: Molina+Royo
To Paloma Cerezal you can tell that the most important person in the world will go to see her, but, if she has a client, she has no doubts. The costumer is above all. Between that axiom and with the fact that she always has a busy schedule, it is very difficult to interview this bridal gown designer, that bears with proud a surname that in Seville is synonymous of ‘know how’; the surname of a family line of tailors and dressmakers that created school. A school that now runs with master hand from her studio in Plaza de la Concordia, 3, (telephone number: 954225109) a woman who was able to learn all the good things of her elders, that was a lot.
You can realize a mile off that she has absorbed the profession, that she has grown surrounded by fabrics and vintage, a lot of vintage and character. Saying ‘Cerezal’ is taking your hat off to magicians of the needle and thimble, that from the street called ‘Cuna’, knocked over the fashion of Seville, having like pattern one of the most important designers of haute couture: Cristóbal Balenciaga. ‘He has been a role model for my family. My old uncle Pepe Cerezal had patterns of that brilliant Basque creator, which we still use today’. Paloma (palomacerezal@gmail.com) remembers excited the lessons from his father, Petete Cerezal, recently deceased.
‘My father gave me all his help and experience. He made me learn the profession as he did: from the studio to the deal with customers at the fitting room. I have no words to thank everything he has taught me, because I think I would not be where I am without his support. It is essential to interpret the idea that each customer has inside and, above all, knowing that a garment is important until the last stitch, because that will be our showcase and our advertising in the street’.
She says that she is always trying to innovate, because she loves launch new ideas, ‘but there many customers who dare not with them. Nevertheless, I always had had in mind that the good dressmaking is the soul of any garment’. Maybe that is why a lot of girls, as she calls them, who choose her to be the author of the most important dress of her lives. ‘Each dress is a world’, usually says Paloma Cerezal, who can be followed on Facebook. ‘A world, but never fall in disguise’.
‘It is true that now all women want to wear dresses with more movement, more youthful and more relaxed. But the most important is that the bride feels safe and for that she must be free to choose the tailoring, because sometimes there are interferences between the taste of the mother and the main protagonist. The goal is to be themselves in a such important date. It is true that girls are becoming more daring not only with the style, also with the hairstyle and, over all, with the way to get the shawl, although the tulle is becoming stronger’.
‘In the ornaments it is still in fashion old laces and little touches of copper or silver in belts, brooches or ribbons. Pieces that usually are bought in antique stores if there is no family jewels to fasten them in the cuts under the breast or in the upsweep of the shawls. The twenties style earrings have become fashionable, although there always be the family diamonds’. But to her studio not only go brides that are keen to get married with the Paloma Cerezal’s signature, also godmothers. ‘My intention is that they do not look like the typical godmothers that seems older than they are, but their appearance would be youthful’.