Eva Franco: Elegant Alternative on Top
Eva Franco once listed daredevil activities such as skydiving and bungee jumping as her favorite hobbies. The Los Angeles–based dressmaker’s latest risk is more entrepreneurial.
After three years of making dresses for her self-named label, sold at 400 boutiques across the United States, she recently debuted the contemporary tops line Lucia, which was seen Sept. 19–21 at Fashion Coterie in New York.
With Lucia, Franco is gambling on how much elegance women want to put in their casual clothes.
Casual tops often mean T-shirts, but for Franco, the T-shirt might be too casual. “When I wore T-shirts, I never felt as feminine as I wanted,” said Franco, 32. She hopes to make the 65-piece line feminine with Peter Pan collar blouses, strapless tops and baby dolls. She strives to make them unique with details such as delicate birds embroidered on the collars or acorn-shaped buttons.
Fabrics are also vital to creating elegance.
Lucia’s fabrics feature Swiss-dot poplins, sheer tulles, lush voiles and jerseys. The fabrics also make use of elements such as Indian embroideries, mercerized copper and even silver eyelash fabric to add more zip to the garments. Wholesale price points for Lucia range from $48 to $150.
Franco is sure that elegance and feminine looks will result in good retail sales. She started experimenting with making tops in 2005 and got a strong reaction from buyers.
Tops are a good investment, according to Fred Levine—co-owner of more than 20 M. Fredric boutiques in Los Angeles County— because tunics and dressy tops are often high on the list as complements to premium-denim jeans.
Franco’s investment in new fabrics might come from her fashion career roots. After graduating from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 1994, she spent a year working for French avant-garde fashion designer Etienne Brunel. The emphasis of that fashion house was to create dresses out of nontraditional materials, such as canvas mailbags and pillowcases.
In following years, Franco scoured flea markets for special fabrics, such as curtain fabric, and made dresses out of them. She typically made 10 to 15 dresses at a time and sold them at flea markets. These days, her company ships more than 3,000 garments each month.
Yet working on tops instead of dresses means shifting gears. “The canvas got smaller,” Franco said of tops. “It’s a tighter box to work with. It makes you concentrate on the details.”
For more information, contact Franco at info@evafranco.com or at (213) 622-9038.
—Andrew Asch
