A new look -- and a favorite dress

One of Sasha's new dresses is built around a glitter bra. (Photo by Tina Tyan)	The Starry, Starry Night dress is a big fan favorite. (Photo by Tina Tyan)

Jan Longmire -- miracle worker

Sasha has two new dresses, and those dresses pushed her costumer to a whole new level.

One of the dresses, a black one, is built around a bra. Yes, a bra. “Sasha came to me with a plain black bra which I covered with crystals and thousands of tiny bugle beads,” Jan Longmire said.

Sasha, who wore the dress for the first time in Kurt Browning’s “Gotta Skate” show, was looking for a new look, a look that showed that she is no longer a little girl, but a woman now. “She looked like a million bucks,” Longmire said. “She wore it well and will keep that dress during the Stars on Ice tour.”

The second dress was a major challenge for Longmire. But she has discovered that the more ideas Sasha presents her, the better costumer she becomes.

“Sasha came to me and told me she wanted a dress that begins at the top with a brilliant turquoise and ends at the bottom in a fuchsia-pink color. Now Sasha is a small person, so there isn’t a lot of space to work with, top to bottom. And to take one set of color and wind up with another—well, let’s just say a lot of fabric went into the garbage making that dress. And on top of that, she wanted hundreds of different kinds of beads, all feathered.”

Did the dress become reality? Of course, it did. “I haven’t seen it under the lights,” Longmire said, “but Sasha called and said it looked really good.” She is also using it on the Stars of Ice tour.

Longmire said Sasha always comes in with very strong ideas and very strong preferences. “I appreciate that, because most people don’t come in with ideas. When you have someone like Sasha, who has huge ideas, it’s amazing that she doesn’t know the process of bringing her ideas to fruition. She just knows what she wants.”

But what Sasha’s ideas do is push Longmire to bring those ideas to life. “I very much want to provide Sasha with what she wants. And in doing so, it makes me better at what I do. I always improve when I work with Sasha because she asks for the impossible. She always wants something you shouldn’t be able to do. But because I am so very fond of her, I’m not going to stop until I get what she wants.”

One of the dresses that Sasha has worn often this past year is the nude-color Starry, Starry night dress. “She came to me about a year ago and told me she wanted a nude dress, with the fabric dyed to match her skin tone and then with a gazillion beads added in the pattern of Van Gogh’s Starry, Starry Night painting,” Longmire said. It has turned out to be a fan favorite.

Longmire saw the dress for the first time on the ice when she went to the “Frosted Pink” benefit. “I literally sat there and was amazed. The dress is a shimmering piece of lights. I couldn’t have foreseen how beautiful it sparkled on the ice. I’ve had fan mail from people all over the world telling me it is the most wonderful thing they have ever seen on the ice. It’s like the dress is lit up, like optic fibers. I even heard a fan say,  ‘She looks like a comet going across the ice.’ ”

Longmire says Sasha is so talented and capable of so much, that she should be given a stage to show her style. So Longmire works her magic.

“Sasha always comes prepared,” Longmire said. She knows exactly what she wants, always. I get better at what I do because of meeting the demands of someone who is not a costumer and is not burdened with the realities of the situation. So you reinvent yourself to make it happen. Every time I work with her, my other clients receive the benefits that they can’t get anywhere else, because no one else has figured out how to do the impossible. When I figure out how to make it happen, it gives me an edge.

When you combine Sasha’s beauty and style and Longmire’s talent, the results are truly amazing.

You can see Longmire’s “magic” at www.janlongmire.com.