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Helen S.Rostmoff Designs Lisa A. Lawrence Helen Rostmoff was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was in Russia in 1990 and there was only one city that I thought stood out for its beauty: St. Petersburg (although when I was there it was still officially Leningrad). When I mentioned to my tour guide how beautiful the city was and how it looked just like Vienna, Austria, he noted that the Russians considered Saint Petersburg to be '"old-fashioned." Instead, they preferred the utilitarian buildings of Moscow, which they thought were "modern." To me, the buildings in Moscow looked like tenement housing. I found it depressing. St. Petersburg, on the other hand, had an old-world charm and magic about it. It was easy to imagine 19th-century horse-drawn carriages arriving at the majestic Winter Palace with all of "society" dressed in their finest. Helen captures the magic of the era in her exquisite designs and re-creations.
Helen's dad was a math professor, while her mom was a housewife. Helen has spent the last ten years living in Toronto, Canada, but she's also lived in Tel Aviv, Israel, Mannheim, Germany and Paris, France. She asserts that she was most influenced by St. Petersburg and Paris. From looking at her doll clothing designs, she's obviously telling the truth!
Helen started to draw and make fashions when she was five years old. She has a master's degree in Arts and Design. "I studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and Design," she states. "Now, I'm a member of Visual Art of Ontario and of the International Association of Artists and Sculptors/des Arts Plastique." Her work experience includes being a fashion designer at Teatrix, Inesse Gordi Atelier, Galit Haute Couture, Idesh Theatre, and other places. She's also designed costumes for troupes and ensembles, historical costumes, high-fashion collections and wedding and evening gowns. She currently runs her own art studio, Hermitage, where she teaches art to kids and adults.
In 1998, Helen received a Gene® doll as a gift from a Gene collector. The doll came with an interesting offer. Helen was asked whether she could come up with some kind of collection of outfits similar to those in the movie Titanic. Helen met this challenge and is now the owner of seven Genes®, four Madras®, one Violet Waters® and three Trents® from the Ashton Drake collection. She also has an Alex®, four Tylers®, two Matts®, one Kitty® and Franklin Mint’s Josephine®. Apparently, designing for dolls suited her!
That same year, Helen attended the New Jersey Gene Convention, which sparked her interest in starting her own doll clothing business. Right away, she opened her own website, at http://www3.sympatico.ca/t_rostmoff.
Helen does a lot of research for each outfit, finding images with the appropriate silhouette, proportions, details, and trimming. Once she has completed her research, she goes out in search of the perfect fabric with which to make her design. She usually buys her fabrics in two retail stores that carry French and Italian fabrics. While she takes different amounts of time to make each outfit, depending on its complexity, most outfits are completed within one to two weeks. The Queen Elizabeth outfit, however, took her three years!
Her repaints, including the hairdo, take her about a week to complete. She finds inspiration for her outfits, repaints and hairdos from several movies, including A Woman of Affairs, Camille, One Way Passage, The Man From Dakota, Cleopatra, Flesh and the Devil, and White Angel. She's also inspired by actors, particularly Madonna, Constance Bennett, Greta Garbo, Dolores del Rio, Kay Francis, Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Clark Gable, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, and Henry Fonda. Recently, Helen did a series of gowns inspired by those worn at the 2004 Academy Awards® by Diane Lane, Nicole Kidman and Liv Tyler.
Before she begins to sew, Helen always draws out a sketch of the outfit. Because she's a professional artist, she's very good at drawing. She enjoys all parts of the creative process: researching, sketching, designing, sewing, hand-beading, and repainting, right up to the point where the doll and/or outfit is completed. Then comes that part she doesn't enjoy: photo shoots and writing descriptions.
While Helen currently wants to keep her business small and personal, at one point she was considering designing and producing her own doll! She wanted a doll that would convey a late 19th-century image that she could use for her many historical costumes. Unfortunately, Franklin Mint beat her to the punch when they came out with the Josephine® Doll!
Helen has been lucky with her business and hasn't run up against any major stumbling blocks in selling her dolls. She sells mostly on her website, has a mailing list, and gets lots of positive feedback. Helen notes, "I really appreciate such a great interest in my work and the warm words about it from all of my customers and other fashion doll fans." As well as working with her dolls, Helen enjoys gardening. If she puts the creativity and effort into her plants that she puts into her doll costumes, I imagine Helen's garden is amazing!
Note: Helen has done so many truly wonderful costumes that I found it very difficult to eliminate pictures for this article. Thus, the next two pages are a visual feast of her many designs. Helen S. Rostmoff Designs Page 2 Helen S. Rostmoff Designs Page 3
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