A Stitch in Time is Sublime

Today’s increasingly grey digital blandscape could be described as a bummer. Busybody machines that can paint cats, forge photos, and write crummy songs have us all hunching shoulders and shaking our little fists in excitement. Why? (etc.) The numbing Age of Machines is truly upon us and we couldn’t be more thrilled. 

In this context, a woman rounding a corner with a tape measure draped around her neck may as well be a cape-wearing superhero. Nelly’s Tailoring in the Upper Village indeed blends into its surroundings like a sort of Bat Cave – the unassuming shopfront concealing an inner grotto of human-powered, artisanal creativity. Just rapping knuckles on Nelly’s half-open Dutch door is heartening. 

“Hello, Jeff!” Nelly Bondarenko emerges from another room with a smile, hand outstretched, tape measure dangling like a liturgical vestment. Her outer office is a tidy little vestibule. Recessed, neatly illuminated shelves bear a pristine collection of decorative porcelain thimbles and detailed scale models of arcane sewing contraptions – a shrine to the magic of needle and thread. 

The Head of a Pin

“I’m committed to do the very, very best work,” she says firmly, but with a grin. Nelly speaks with a musical, untraceable accent. She has been at this for some 30 years and has the reputation of a thread-wielding genie. Does she have a fairly steady clientele? 

“Besides my couple hundreds of clients, I still get new ones. They hear somewhere about the quality work and labor that I deliver.” What I know about garment surgery could be neatly parked on the head of a pin, but I do know it is meticulous, close work that succeeds on painstaking attention to the minutest detail. So 200+ clients?! Nelly offers another mellow grin. 

“I pleasurably do this work,” she says. Her early training in another loving life project – one familiar to many of us – helped her find balance. “I learned with raising kids that it’s patience. If I love it – and I do – I can do it.” She hasn’t always been this sanguine. “I used to be very stressed in a way like, oh my god, people need it tomorrow!” Nelly laughs lightly. “Now I’m like, life is happening every day and it’s okay.”Just like that? She thinks for a minute.

“Well, sometimes it’s in my mind throughout the night. Sometimes,” she says in a confessional tone, “I’ll wake up and make some notes on how to finish something. It brings me joy and brings me that adrenaline to make it happen. Because I did work with Nordstrom, with Saks Fifth Avenue, and quite a few designers, I’ve seen it all. From luxury brands all the way to the little things…”

L´vivs´ke Vyshche Profesiyne Uchylyshche Tekhnolohiy Ta Servisu

“So I finished the L’vivs’ke Vyshche Profesiyne Uchylyshche Tekhnolohiy Ta Servisu,” Nelly says. “In English the Lviv Higher Vocational School of Technologies and Service in Ukraine. Coming to the United States, of course it was a hard thing and it’s not easy with a family of nine. So my parents brought me here.” That was in 1992. “11 months later after immigration, my fiancé, my husband came here, so we got married and started our family.”

Nelly had long been musically training in a traditional Ukrainian folk instrument called the bandura, a natural outgrowth of her entire family’s devotion to music, as an art form and even in performance. But at that time a lingering Soviet persecution of Christians in the Ukraine limited her options. Obliged to go to the vocational school in Lviv – several hours by train from her hometown of Rivne – she earned a 4-year baccalaureate diploma in garment work and tailoring, graduating with honors. It was a high-level practical education that would later stun her American mentors. Nelly did not initially equate her education with hew new life in America.

“I had my diploma and everything,” she says of that period. “I was like, okay. Good. Great. But I didn’t find that it was my passion, not immediately.” As a new mother in need of a vocation, Nelly was in fact searching for her passion. As her family grew, she became anxious. “I thought, I don’t know what I want to do in the United States, but I cannot sit still. But where would I go to school? And all of a sudden, of course, it just hit me.” The Nelly smile lights up the room. “I’ve been to school. I pretty much had a profession in my hands!”

What is Montecito?

Nelly was initially an in-house helpmate to her mother, who was also a tailor. Word got out, as it will. “It would be just based out of our home, like a few colors of threads and a machine.” One tradition of the family’s adoptive hometown lent itself to sewing. Lots of sewing. “I remember having this Fiesta time – humongous skirts with layers and layers of fabrics. So we kind of started with all that. Then it became more people knowing. ‘Oh there’s a Ukrainian family who does this work…’” 

Her firstborn was growing, and Nelly started making inquiries. Her first gig proved consequential in ways she could never have imagined. “I was hired, invited to one of the very good designers. He was Loutfi’s Originals at 1225 Coast Village Road.” Before bringing her in, this magnanimous gentleman, designer Shammas Loutfi, would see in Nelly an outsized talent she was at that time too preoccupied to see in herself. 

“He saw how my English barrier made me shy. But he would look at my work and say, ‘Nelly, you should be in Montecito!’ I was like, okay… What is Montecito?” In time, and with Loutfi’s ceaseless, gentle encouragement, Nelly would see herself through his eyes. “He was my mentor, my coach, my father. Yes, he’s the age of my father right now. It’s just amazing how much he saw in me and encouraged me.” Once at a fitting, Loutfi asked Nelly to bring him some chalk to mark a garment. Chalk? Unsure, she filled both hands with everything she could carry related to a fitting. “He looked at me and smiled,” she says with some emotion. “He said, ‘we’ll learn one word at a time, right?’” Nelly pauses. “It was that very big heart of his. It was just very lovely to be acknowledged.”

When Loutfi retired, on his recommendation Nelly approached and was hired by Cuban-born designer Luis Estévez, known for his sinuous dresses, plunging necklines, and for having dressed such luminaries as Eva Gabor, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Natalie Wood, Carol Channing. Yes, Estevez had a boutique on Coast Village Road. Nelly would later work for Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom.  Her time with Luis did gift her a priceless friendship, a mentor still central to Nelly’s work – and life. “At Luis I’ve met my sister in tailoring. She is Letizia, from whom I’m learning until this day.”

The Happy Place

Nelly would go on to launch, in fits and starts, her own business; with more than a little help from her dearest – and most constant, patient friend. “Business was growing. I was like, oh my gosh, I need this machine, but I need space. Luckily with my very nice husband,” she says, smiling broadly, “each place we moved into as a house, he would make me a little space there. And it would be amazing.” 

Today, Nelly’s roster of absolutely dedicated customers count on her expert, loving alterations of their prized couture – her finely wrought work tantamount to correctly faceting a diamond. Leaving Ukraine as a hesitant but educated artist, Nelly has made her own good fortune. “With the biggest support of my husband and 3 children I am here! My little home away from home! My happy place!” How to sum up her still-unfolding adventure?

“The point is learning, and wanting to be, and being. I still feel humbled that I was brought here, I was acknowledged, and I still can grow. I still grow every day.”