‘Best-kept secret’
Designer heals wounded lives along with recycling fur pieces
NOV. 29
“If Scrooge Was a Brother”:
NOV. 30 “A Gospel According to Jazz Christmas”: Ballet Memphis: “The Nutcracker”: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 30; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Dec. 1; final performance 2 p.m. Dec. 2. Tickets: $10, $22, $43, $72. Memphis
When women come to Dress for Success in East Memphis, they get more than an interview suit.
For the past five years, volunteer Ruby Dandridge, 61, has been there all day, five days a week. “I don’t just suit them,” she said. “I counsel them.”
When she isn’t there, she may be at home designing and hand-sewing flamboyant mink purses and other accessories out of old fur stoles. You might say she helps recycle lives and old fur pieces.
She had previously volunteered for four years at MIFA. When she started volunteering at Dress for Success, she was going through a terrible divorce. But the problems of the women who passed through her hands could be so much worse. “It makes you not even look at your own situation,” she said. “I started soothing the young ladies. So many come through these doors and needed somebody to show love.”
Some women come in with an attitude. They may be there as part of satisfying requirements to get some form of assistance. They may not want to try on clothes.
Dandridge tactfully brings them clothes in the sizes they say they wear and the larger sizes they may actually need. It spares them the embarrassment of having to ask. She chooses blouses, stockings and jewelry, perhaps some pretty scarves. “I’m going to send them out nice, the way I would want to go out and look,” she said.
Sometimes, a woman hangs back. “You don’t want to come to the mirror — pretty as you look?” Dandridge asks. “You don’t want to see yourself?” She walks the young woman to the mirror, usually with good results.
“They’ll be so amazed with the way they look, they start crying,” she said. “They say they didn’t know they could look that good.”
“They can look like a lady, and be beautiful with the right attire instead of showing everything,” said their older counselor. “When they go out, they have a new personality.”
Dandridge talked about the joy of her work so much, she got her sister, Mary Lay, to volunteer too. She comes in now about two days a week.
The interview clothes do help. Many women find jobs and come back to get a work wardrobe.
Dandridge can dress women who have nothing and women who have everything.
When she was married, she got bored. She had a lot of old fur pieces, her own and some from her mother and grandmother. “Instead of letting them dry rot, I took them and created something,” she said. She started with hats and then moved to purses, sewing everything by hand. “I loved fashion, and I couldn’t afford it. So I took what I had and made the best of it.”
She made a clutch purse of pony hair with a fur loop to stick one’s hand through. She made patchwork purses from mink, beaver and pony hair, and she stitched a cap of mink. Some items she decorated with rhinestone trim from an old dress or a vintage pin.
She has sold some of her work to her sister-inlaw. But few others have seen it besides Memphis designer Marva Ballard, who calls Dandridge “a best-kept secret.”
Dandridge recently brought samples of her work to Ballard’s studio Fashion designer Ruby Dandridge of Memphis with a pony hair clutch she designed and stitched.
A patchwork purse of mink, beaver and other fur. A fur hat by Ruby Dandridge of Memphis, modeled by Cynthia Stovall. Downtown. Ballard called the bags and hats “fabulous,” “extremely well-made” and the kind of statement-maker the right woman would eat up if offered in the right place. “That may not be Memphis,” she said. She could see a market among entertainers, and in New York, Chicago and maybe Atlanta.
For now, the fur accessories are mostly a hobby. But Dandridge could see testing the market in a year or so. She doesn’t know what price she would charge.
Meanwhile, she waits for quiet young women to come through the door at Dress For Success. She knows there can be new beginnings. “I came here very wounded, but I couldn’t think of me because I was helping young ladies,” she said. “It helped heal me also.” Fashion editor Barbara Bradley can be reached at 901-529-2370.