Mina's Fashions: A Local Sensation At Modest Fly's "Handmade" Show

By Rebecca L. Mate

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I cannot wait to see what local artist/designer/seamstress Mina Prieto will bring to the annual Handmade Show, December 7 2014  from 11am-5pm, at the Modest Fly Art Studio Gallery (across from Tommy Burgers and Denny's Restaurant in Tujunga). Her designer aprons are each one-of-a-kind, her hats are fun and her cell-phone sized purses are cute.

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Last year when I showed my art at the Modest Fly Gallery's Handmade Show alongside Prieto, I had no idea what a precious gem of a designer-seamstress she was. At the Handmade Show, along with her purses and artork, she displayed a cover-up jacket of her own design that demanded attention and landed her commission seamstress work. In digging deeper, I found that Prieto is a rare talent, right under our noses. 

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In the studio of her modest house in Tujunga, decorated with her own fine art paintings, kept copany by a small black Chihuahua and poodle, 73-year-old designer-seamstress Prieto turns out marvels of fashion for those who, by word of mouth, have discovered her sewing talents.

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Recently she made a strapless pearl satin and lace wedding dress for Zari Wigfall, a graduate of Disney School of Arts who designs costumes for dance shows. Prieto uses no pattern and works off of only the photo brought to her by the bride, although she did add her own flair to the back of the dress with a waist-to-floor lacey slit that opened when she walked to reveal the satin gown beneath. She designed and made a hat for the bride along with the dress, painstakingly replacing the stones with more brilliant stones. It took three fittings during the process of constructing the gown to cut the material, to hand sew it and then machine sew it. One of the time-consuming details of a wedding gown is that you have to remove any pearls or rhinestones or beads from lace when making pleats and sew them back on so the dress appears to be a seamless fit of the bride's curves.

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Prieto additionally made a dress for the mother of the bride, Phyllis, deep blue velvet with a short silvery lace jacket. The material fee for the jacket alone cost $125 a yard. Phyllis said, "Mina is excellent with her work. She's incredible! This is her joy. She loves making and designing clothing."

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Prieto's daughter, Claudia Chicas, also a resident of Tujunga, who grew up helping in her mother's business, "Mina's Fashions--Haute Couture," said "I cannot stress enough the importance of selecting the material that works for the dress and the body type. My mother knows what styles will work on a woman."

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Born in El Salvador, the daughter of a woman with a dressmaking business who employed 3 seamstresses, Prieto began studying at age 14 at the Academia Alder, an academy for the sewing arts. In 1978, until 2002, she had her own business in the "Beverly Hills" of San Salvador, on the "Rodeo Drive" of the area, called Zona Rosa. She designed and sewed for the wealthy, and charged more than most in her industry. She used Vogue magazine for her inspiration, and some of her traveling customers brought fine, expensive fabrics from Spain, etc. for her to use. She created jewelry, hats, wraps and any kind of clothing, mostly for women. A famous Nicaraguan painter/actor/writer, Julio Sequeira, for whom she made a performance outfit for a controversial play he wrote, including a simple but exotic cape with a border over tight satin pants, wrote on a painting he gave her, "Admirando su arte aplicado textil," which means, "I admire your textile art."

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"If I don't like you, I don't sew for you," says Prieto, (who I've observed, readily loves and admires people), "God gave me the talent. While I sew, I am thinking of the person. It is very individualized. I'm not thinking of the money; I work to create something that will make that person beautiful."