For Dhivya Balasubramanian, the story often starts with a sari. Sometimes a client brings one in, folded carefully and full of family history. Other times, Balasubramanian pulls from the collection she has gathered on trips to India. Either way, the fabric usually comes first. At her Queen Anne studio, it might become a gown, a tailored suit, or a cocktail dress made to fit one person perfectly.

Balasubramanian is the designer behind DHIVYA BALA, a bridal and formalwear label centered on custom garments and hand tailoring. Her new collection, “Draped in History,” arrives just in time for wedding season.

Dhivya Balasubramanian in her Queen Anne studio, where saris and heirloom textiles become custom formalwear.

Courtney of DHIVYA BALA

Originally from Kerala, in South India, Balasubramanian moved to the United States more than 20 years ago for graduate school. Fashion came later, as a second career and, as she puts it, “a reinvention of sorts.” In her 30s, while living in California, she started reassessing what she wanted her work to look like. She had studied hospitality and tourism, but that career path no longer felt right.

Fashion had been in the back of her mind for years. As a teenager in India, she applied to fashion school after high school and made it through several rounds of the application process before missing the final cut. She planned to try again, but college life pulled her in another direction. She studied history, made friends, and followed the path in front of her. “I was having too much fun in college,” she says.

Years later, the old interest came back. Balasubramanian enrolled at Apparel Arts in San Francisco, where she studied pattern making, draping, and technical garment construction. She spent three months in New York interning at Marchesa and Nanette Lepore, where the work was unpaid and demanding. “It was backbreaking, grueling work,” she says. “I learned the fashion industry and fashion district like the back of my hand by the end of that.”

She moved to Seattle after her husband took a job at Amazon and their first child was still a baby. For a while, she freelanced, including work with costume designers and private clients. In 2020, she set up her studio as a made-to-order, made-to-measure design space, a model that comes partly from the way she grew up. In India, Balasubramanian remembers going with her mother to the local tailor, choosing from the many fabrics, looking through pattern books, and asking for what she wanted. “Every family had their tailor shop, the local tailor shop,” she says. “It wasn’t expensive.” She loved the anticipation of waiting for fabric to become a garment.

“That customization, that attention to detail, knowing what my client wants and kind of crafting something that looks beautiful on her body and fits her style and her taste,” she says. “That was the premise on which I started.”

Through DHIVYA BALA, Balasubramanian designs made-to-measure pieces that are tailored locally. A bride might bring in a family sari, while someone else might arrive with a favorite dress or a Pinterest board inspired by what she wants to wear for a special occasion. From there, Balasubramanian sketches, fits, cuts, and builds the piece with them. The process usually takes four to six weeks. “I think it’s nice to have that choice of being able to get something that fits you and that you were part of the creation process,” she says. “It makes fashion very personal, as opposed to just going online and ordering something.”

The Cocktail Dress

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Smoking, YSL Pant Suit

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During fashion school, Balasubramanian took a short couture sewing course where each student had to design and create a gown. She cut up one of her mother’s old saris and made a dress from it. A sari can contain five to six yards of fabric. Even if a textile is damaged, there is still enough material to create something new. “A lot of it is that the fabric is the inspiration, the sari is the inspiration, and kind of guides what that outfit becomes,” she says.

The eight-piece collection includes a Grecian gown, a Regency-inspired jacket, a flapper dress, a Dior-style bar suit, a cocktail dress, a mod shift dress, a ball gown inspired by Charles James, and a jewel-toned take on Yves Saint Laurent’s 1966 “Le Smoking” pantsuit. “My creations are my interpretations of the dual, conflicting, east-meets-west world that I inhabit,” she says. The idea began with a few dresses Balasubramanian could not stop thinking about, including the white dress from the final scene of “Dirty Dancing” and Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress.

The Flapper

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She researched fashion history and mapped out silhouettes that could work with a sari’s structure, length, borders, and embellishment. The Regency piece grew out of her love of Jane Austen and period dramas, while the Charles James-inspired gown gave her a technical challenge. “I wanted to learn and kind of push myself in recreating something that was very technically challenging,” she says.

The collection recently showed at downtown gallery Art Love Salon. “The model as a piece of art, a living installation amongst the art, that was very exciting to me,” she says. “Clothes can be art. And the art of dressmaking is a creative process.”

Balasubramanian collects fabric scraps and uses them for packaging details, small drawstring bags, and future product ideas. She shops secondhand and looks for older pieces before buying new ones. That instinct, she says, comes from childhood as much as fashion school. She grew up in a household where very little was thrown away. Shopping bags were brought from home and boxes were reused, while fabric, sheets, and household items found second lives. “My mother would not throw away anything,” she says. “If you can find a use for it, it was used as something else.”

New Look, Dior Bar Suit

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That thinking now shapes the business she is building. “I wanted to create a brand that told a story, has a mission to it, and also wanted to involve the client or involve the customer in that process and that mission,” she says.

For now, the studio remains a working space rather than a full retail shop, but she hopes to eventually expand into a designer boutique with a range of bridal and formalwear, along with pieces made from leftover materials.