Wed Dossier Retro BECKY BESOULIS
Amalie Drury
Queen Becky’s Lace
The late fashion designer Becky Bisoulis was beloved by Chicago society for her flattering evening gowns and wedding dresses, often sewn from yards upon yards of lace.
With her chiseled Greek features and statuesque frame, Becky Bisoulis was a woman as regal as the dresses she designed. “The image I have of her is so sheer and fluid. She was like a swan —totally poised,” says photographer John Reilly, who captured Bisoulis on many occasions.
The Evanston-born Bisoulis’ career reached its peak in the 1980s and early ’90s, when her sleek daywear was sold in major department stores including Saks Fifth Avenue, and high-profile brides flocked to her River North studio.
Gerri Shute commissioned a Bisoulis gown for her wedding to the late Sears General Counsel David Shute in 1989. She stood before a mirror while Bisoulis asked, “How do you want to look?” Shute didn’t know, so Bisoulis began draping bolts of satin and lace around her client, instructing seamstresses about where to place pins. Years later, Shute wore the dress again to a friend’s birthday party in Portofino, Italy. “It was the prettiest garment I ever owned,” she says.
In 1987, Bisoulis’ friend Hazel Barr convinced the designer to make her daughter Karen’s wedding dress—plus seven maids’ dresses and a mother-of-the-bride gown—in four months. “Oh watch out for my puffs, don’t crush the puffs,” the bride said in the Tribune story about her nuptials.
“Great huge sleeves—it was stunning,” says Barr. “If Becky said she’d do your gown, you knew it would be the most spectacular thing that ever walked down the aisle. What she did with a piece of lace was incredible.”
Bisoulis herself never married and, sadly, died of brain cancer in 1994 at age 56. Her Tribune obituary repeated something she’d told a reporter four years before. “As an artist, I love to look at beautiful things. I don’t get the same satisfaction looking at an IBM Selectric... if you don’t have sensuality in the things around you, what’s the point of living?”
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