Denver Fashion Week Will Include This Romantic Escape to the Past

With all the uncertainty in the world, a year-long run-up to a nail-biting presidential election and a barrage of over-stimulating social media, we all need a little escape once in a while. Designer Nico Gustafson finds relief by going back in time — to the Victorian era, to be exact. Dubbing herself the Victorian Romanian, a nod to her home country of Romania, Gustafson says she's drawn to the fashions of that time not only for their beauty, but because they serve as a way to leave current society, if only for a little while.

Gustafson’s passion for the Victorian era started very early. She recalls being asked to write a school essay responding to the question “If you could go back in the past, where would you go?” Her answer: “I would go back to when they wore the poofy dresses!”

She’s not sure where the obsession came from, but she remembers that as a child, she would grab bedcovers with big ruffles and wrap them around herself, using a belt to hold it all together. Later, she learned more about the history of the Victorian era and settled on the bustle dresses as her favorite — “You know, when they had the big badonkadonk!” she laughs.

Gustafson hails from Romania, but her mother and the friends she had in Denver encouraged her to move to America in 2000. Prior to that, her grandmother had taught her to sew. But when Gustafson wanted complicated Victorian dresses that were beyond her skill set, she commissioned sewists to make them for her. That is, until they started taking longer and longer to complete the work.

“Every time I would ask, ‘Where’s my dress?,’ I would get a sob story about somebody in the family dying. So I would hire someone else, and the same thing happened,” she says. Eventually, she got tired of hearing all the excuses and decided to make her own.

Armed with her knowledge of basic sewing skills, she found a class on YouTube by a woman who taught viewers how to sew a Victorian dress. Gustafson bought the patterns and fabric, then sat down to learn through the videos. “The instructor would say one sentence, and I’d press pause and replay it," she recalls. "She would use terminology I didn’t know, so I would Google it and just figure it out."
“Figuring it out” is how Gustafson produces many of her creations. She'll usually reference antique fashion-plate illustrations of Victorian dresses that she admires and then improvise their creation. Most often, the fabric is what guides her, she says.

“It's almost like the fabric tells me what I need to make with it,” she muses. “Or I see a fabric and in my mind, it matches a pattern. I can’t draw. My visions are all in my head.”

Because of budget constraints, Gustafson says that much of her fabric comes from repurposed drapes and sheets from Goodwill and Facebook Marketplace. “Fabric is expensive, and I need at least ten yards for every outfit, plus a couple of extra yards if I make a mistake," she explains. "That adds up. I could spend a lot buying it new, or I can buy a sheet from Goodwill for $3, and you just can’t beat that."

She did a couple of small fashion shows and then the Fashion West show in 2022, which led to recognition of her as a designer and an invitation to show at the upcoming Denver Fashion Week Couture Night on November 16.

While Gustafson gets her inspiration from original Victorian dress designs, the final product has evolved into her own unique creation. As she works on a dress, she keeps an open mind as to how it will come out.

“Because Victorian fashion is so intricate and has so much of what I call ‘frosting,’ with ruffles and details, how it turns out often depends on how much I procrastinate in making it,” she admits. “My original idea may be five rows of ruffles, but by the time I’m done messing around, I’ll end up with just one row.”

Because she makes everything by hand, Gustafson says she tries to be forgiving with herself, acknowledging that she can always add more embellishments later to make a second version of the dress. “Usually," she says, "I’m just grateful to have a new outfit.”

But where does one wear such an outfit? You typically don’t see people in Denver dressed in Victorian style. But in 2015, before Gustafson began making her own Victorian dresses, she discovered a Colorado-based Victorian Society through an ad for a formal tea party that someone sent her, knowing her love for Victorian fashion.

“I was like, 'Hold your horses, there's a Victorian Society?'” she exclaims. “All I had at the time was an eighteenth-century dress like Marie Antoinette that was a Halloween costume. I took the pannier hoop skirt off the hips and put the extra fabric at the back to create a bustle. I was kind of a disaster, but I went to the tea party and I was exploding with excitement. I found my people!”
The club had started a couple of decades earlier, in 1989, and became a nonprofit under the name the Victorian Society of Colorado Springs in 2008. It almost dissolved in 2014, but then Kimary Marchese volunteered to keep it going under the condition that it be moved to Denver and the name changed to the Victorian Society of Colorado. As with any hobby club, people come and go. Gustafson took over as president this year and is determined to keep it going by actively recruiting new members through monthly events and annual balls.

She also credits it with unknowingly setting the wheels in motion for her future as a fashion designer, because now she had a need for a wardrobe of Victorian dresses.

Her passion for these bygone fashions also prompted another business venture to help others who are interested in the Victorian era escape into the fantasy for a day. For that, she offers an Airbnb experience for Colorado residents and tourists that she calls “Become a Victorian Lady,” in which she dresses people in historically accurate Victorian fashion, does their hair and explains how women of the past created the silhouettes of Victorian fashion. Then she takes them out to the Brown Palace for afternoon high tea.

In the meantime, Gustafson is busy preparing for Denver Fashion Week, where she plans to show outfits primarily focused on the bustle era, with some designs dipping into a few years beyond, as well as some menswear. She says the show is primarily for the sake of artistic expression, since none of her pieces are for sale. That meant she also faced a challenge of finding models to fit the dresses she plans to show. “I only sew for myself, so when I was casting for the show, the models had to be very close to my size," she says. "Unfortunately, I’m not an equal-opportunity designer, because I don’t create a variety of sizes."

For Gustafson, creating Victorian-style clothes and immersing herself into Victorian-style settings with like-minded Victorian enthusiasts is the way she copes with the world at large.

“I truly have such a hard time living in the present," she says, "so I find any means I can to go to the past.”

She hopes that for a few fleeting moments during the upcoming show, she can bring others along with her.

Denver Fashion Week starts Saturday, November 9; the Victorian Romanian will show at DFW Couture Night, 7 p.m. Saturday, November 16, at the Brighton, 3403 Brighton Boulevard. Find the full schedule and tickets at denverfashionweek.com.