SHE pulled out a piece of cloth about the size of a newspaper tabloid page.
It was in her storeroom.
She held it up for barely a minute, agreed to a picture and then carefully put it back.
Mrs Elisa Chew, 70, first got to know Mrs Lee Kuan Yew – Madam Kwa Geok Choo – nearly 30 years ago.
That simple piece of material she showed The New Paper is significant to her.
Mrs Lee turned the material into a cheongsam which she wore while celebrating National Day at the Istana in 1998.
The material was designed by Mrs Chew. She said Mrs Lee’s taste can be summed up this way – simple, never loud and always elegant.
Yesterday The New Paper visited Mrs Chew at her nondescript shop in a corner of a quiet housing estate in Marine Parade.
Named after the owner, it has been at Laguna Park since 1975.
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Memories:Mrs Elisa Chew (above) holding up the picture
that she took with Mrs Lee in 1995 when she visited her
shop.
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Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew was Prime Minister then.
She was still reeling from the shock of Mrs Lee’s passing on Saturday. She had been tracking Mrs Lee’s health in the newspapers.
She said in Mandarin: “Mrs Lee started coming to myshop around 20 to 30 years ago.” Traditional outfits Mrs Chew sells mainly traditional cheongsams, but also carries a range of floral-print blouses, pants and skirts.
Everything in the shop is designed by the owner herself, who studied fashion design in the renowned Ray-Vogue School of Fashion Design in Chicago in the early 70s.
Her shop’s walls are adorned with pictures of often- photographed women. Some pictures are fading from age.
There’s just one picture of her with Mrs Lee. She said: “Mrs Lee was trying some clothes and when she came out of the fitting room, I asked if it was alright for me to take a picture with her.
“She agreed.”
That was in 1995.
Mrs Lee would often drop in on weekdays, sometimes calling ahead.
Household name among wives of leaders here
Her name may not be as familiar as Diane von Furstenberg or Giorgio Armani.
But Mrs Elisa Chew has become a household name among the wives of presidents
and ministers in Singapore.
Her 35-year-old boutique, Elisa, is situated in the residential neighbourhood of Laguna Park.
Two walls in her shop are covered with images of Mrs Chew with some of Singapore’s
most important people.
The framed pictures include those of Tampines GRC MP Irene Ng and Mrs Goh Chok
Tong, both wearing cheongsams designed by Mrs Chew.
Other pictures show her rubbing shoulders with President S R Nathan and the late former president Ong Teng Cheong.
Trained in fashion design in Chicago, Mrs Chew personally designs all the clothes in her boutique.
The designs are later sent to Shanghai where the clothes are made.
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Mrs Chew said: “It’s hard to say when she would come by. She was a busy woman with a lot of things to
do. “Mrs Lee never once expected me to close the shop just so that I could serve her alone.”
Whenever she visited, Mrs Lee would enter discreetly and without any sort of fanfare. She usually entered alone, while her bodyguard waited outside the shop.
And though they’ve known each other for about 30 years, Mrs Chew sees herself, as simply someone who sold clothes to Mrs Lee. So at functions which she attended, with so many important people in the crowd, Mrs Chew said she never expected Mrs Lee to recognise her.
“But she did and even if she was busy, she would acknowledge me and call me by my first name. That made me very happy.”
Loud colours and clothes with sparkly embellishments were never Mrs Lee’scup of tea. Instead, she would opt for clothes that were pastel- coloured and pleasing to the eye.
The furthest she would go is to allow small flower prints on her clothes.
“She would buy only clothes that were well put together and elegant – I could tell that she knew what she was doing,” said Mrs Chew.
She never picked the most expensive material.
Mrs Chew explained: “She was not the kind to be fixated on expensive clothing or buy only high-end products.
“As long as she liked something and it fit her well, she would buy it.
“She would browse through the racks and picked out the items that she liked.”
Love for orchid motifs
Mrs Chew vividly remembers that Mrs Lee loved fabric with orchid motifs which she would then take to another cheongsam maker.
The spools of cloth with orchid motifs were designed by Mrs Chew in the 1990s. They gained popularity after they were exhibited at several Orchid Shows, which exhibited only clothes with orchid motifs.
If there is one trait that Mrs Chew fondly remembers Mrs Lee by, it was that she always made an effort to interact with the other customers in the shop.
“She would treat everyone as an equal and talk to them, regardless of their backgrounds,” she said. Depending on who she was talking with, she would either speak in English or Mandarin.
Mrs Chew’s breakthrough came in the early 1990s when she displayed her designs for cheongsam material at Orchid Shows.
It was at a time when Singapore was hunting for a national dress.
The piece of cloth Mrs Chew held up for The New Paperwas from her line of orchid designs. It became a source of pride not just because Mrs Lee turned it into a cheongsam.
But that a friend wore it with pride. Over the years, the business-client relationship turned into a friendship and Mrs Lee would ask after Mrs Chew’s family. But these
conversations, like her grief, must remain private, said Mrs Chew.
“I will definitely miss her. She had been a great model to all of us and her kindness had indeed touched me.”
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This article first appeared in The New Paper.
