CORAL GABLES — Gabriella Arango’s boutique is a soft-light study in modern Cinderella dreams, a place where miles of silk and lace, beaded bodices and tiered flounces enchant young women with the promise of transforming them into a princess for a day.

The Italian-born designer has worked in the Miami area since 1972, creating evening gowns for the likes of Madonna and Gloria Estefan and inaugural ball gowns for several Central American first ladies. She has also designed hundreds of gowns for brides and quinceañeras in South Florida.

Though fashions change, Arango is proud of the timelessness of her designs.

“It all depends on what the girl wants,” she said. “Every girl has her dream, often a dream she’s been working on, expanding and adding detail to, since she was a child. She knows how she wants to look on her special day. It’s my goal to understand her dream and help her realize it.”

She works to help each young woman have the dream night by making sure the gown doesn’t just conform to a fantasy, but is also beautiful for her figure and face.

“One of the most important things I do is give them advice,” she said.

Her boutique on Miracle Mile is full of inspiration, with hundreds of samples in every color of the rainbow lining the walls.

A hopeless romantic, Arango came to South Florida after meeting and falling in love with a Cuban-American lawyer.

“I met him in Rome in front of the Trevi Fountain,” she said. “It was love at first sight.”

The couple was married in a church in Rome at midday. Her own gown, which she designed, is evidence of how styles have changed. It was off-white, with short sleeves and a lace overlay. And it was short, something very few of the gowns she designs today are.

Though her influences are Italian, designers like Emilio Schuberth, she has incorporated South Florida into her designs, using the classic guayabera style to adorn everything from ball gowns to mother of the bride suits. “The guayabera is a piece of clothing that is very tropical,” she said. “It goes with the ocean and the sun and the life here.”

She’s done weddings where every member of the wedding party wore a guayabera or a guayabera-inspired gown.

Every Arango gown is custom made, with the sewing and embroidery and all the embellishments done in her shop. She only works in silk, but the embellishments run the gamut from simple lace overlays to complicated embroidery and beading. A gown may take as long  as a month and a half to create if it’s design is complex. She can do rush jobs and sometimes does for brides who are marrying soon or have traveled to Miami to get their gown and won’t be able to come back in a month to pick it up. Many of her clients are from Central America. Arango’s confections start at $2,000.

Arango also occasionally adapts a mother’s wedding gown for her daughter, adjusting it not just for fit, but for the daughter’s tastes.

“That can be difficult because sometimes the mother really wants the daughter to wear her dress, but the daughter doesn’t want to,” she said. Often, Arango is able to help the two compromise, with a dramatically different dress based on mother’s original.

Over the years, Arango’s  business has become a family affair, with two of her daughters and her sister working with her.  She has four other daughters and a son, spread out from Miami to Rome. She designed the wedding dresses for her two daughters who are married.

“This is what I love to do, so naturally I loved doing it for them,” she said.

Photo by: Jeruel Garado