Designing the future

Incandescent Bridal owner Sheila Halali has brought her modern, urban and nontraditional wedding designs to Chico. Born in Ohio, Halali, 25, attended Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Ga., thinking she was going live in New York, become a fashion designer, and enjoy a Sex in the City lifestyle. Then she met Felipe Urrutia, who was in the Army and stationed at nearby Fort Stewart. They were already committed to each other when Halali moved to New York City as planned, but after two years, Urrutia became homesick for Orland, where he grew up. They decided to move to California and compromised on San Francisco, but neither was really happy there either. Now they are in Chico, and Halali says she’s felt a warm welcome into our comparatively small community as she launches her first collection online. See her fine art bridal studio for yourself at incandescentbridal.com.

What’s your specialty?

Wedding dresses and separates, like skirts and tops. It offers a lot of options to mix and match, so if you love the top of one dress and the bottom of another, sometimes you could get it as a skirt and a top.

Isn’t that less formal than usual?

Sometimes. There still are very formal, like full-lace, options. There’s also this big trend right now of over-skirts, so you’ll get a dress and then you’ll put a skirt over it, which is like the big poofy ceremony look, and then you take it off and have a slimmer dress underneath. That way you don’t have to bustle and it’s a little bit lighter.

I see black designs on your website. Are people getting married in black?

More and more, color is becoming a really big trend in bridal, which I think is gonna stick around. I don’t think trend is really the right word. For me, I wear head-to-toe black, white and navy every day. I don’t wear color. The majority of my friends [and even] the majority of the women in New York City wear head-to-toe black every day, and that’s my customer, the urban woman. The thought of me putting on a full-length white dress to stand in front of a million people is a terrifying thought for me, that would be the least comfortable thing in the world. I would want to wear black, black is what I’m comfortable in, it’s what I feel the best in. It’s timeless, classic.

What’s your goal for Incandescent Bridal?

I released six looks in June, and I’ve got another six in the works to be added as part two of this collection to launch in the beginning of October or late September. I’m really hoping to … get the pieces to the stores. Especially since I have such a nontraditional take on bridal, it’s a lot harder to find those customers on my own, whereas they’re going to stores that specifically stock those nontraditional pieces. So that’s the goal.