KANSAS CITY, Mo. — “We’re very self-conscious about our bodies, and we’re fighting that every day.” So said Misa Kuranaga, a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, one day in December by phone.
She was in the midst of rehearsing the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy for the annual “Nutcracker” production and ruminating on the importance of leotards. As she spoke, Ms. Kuranaga was wearing a leotard with a mesh top and mock turtleneck, and a patterned body that began just at the breastbone.
“What you wear doesn’t make you a better dancer, but it can make you a more confident dancer,” said Sarah Chun, a first soloist with Northern Ballet in Leeds, England, via Skype a few days later. “If you’re not having the best morning, but you’re wearing something that you like, and you look at yourself in the mirror you think, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got this.’”
When it comes to workout wear, leggings and tank tops tend to get all the attention, but leotards, once a favorite of the aerobics crew and the essential everyday wardrobe of the professional dancer, could be making a comeback thanks to the popularity of ballet classes as exercise regimens.
And when it comes to leotards, many dancers have begun to favor a small brand from Kansas City, Mo., Elevé Dancewear. It sells premade styles, but its specialty is custom work that can address (and ameliorate) insecurities around one’s body.
Elevé offers about 60 styles, and once you factor in all the permutations of fabrics, fit and more, there are millions of possibilities.
Elevé’s founder, Lisa Choules, 49, understands her market intuitively, as she is a former dancer. “I was self-conscious, especially coming back after two kids,” she said. “I was tall at 5-8, with a long, thin body, but I was busty. So I’d have to buy a medium leotard for the length, but it was so wide, I’d get this weird bubble out the back and it was not flattering at all.”
Raising two children on a regional dancer’s salary also meant Ms. Choules was usually struggling financially, so she often bought her practice wear at thrift stores.
She began cutting up secondhand leotards to use as patterns, and started making her own, relying on sewing skills she had picked up from her mother, and at high school in Salt Lake City, where she studied at Ballet West.
Ms. Choules chose bright colors and prints for her own practice wear. Then, “when I came to Kansas City Ballet after having my kids, people asked, ‘Can you make me a leotard, too?’” she said. “I sent a few to friends in other companies. I’d make a handful and sell them to the summer students that came into town if I needed money.”
She retired from KCB at 37, wrote a business plan, and applied for a grant from Career Transitions for Dancers, receiving enough money to spend a summer at the Fashion Institute of Technology studying drawing, draping and pattern drafting.
Back in Kansas City, she rearranged her basement for more efficient production, and built a website that allowed dancers to custom configure leotards, choosing from a library of about 40 fabrics — far more than most rival brands, which typically offered leotards in black, white and a handful of solid, and restrained, colors.
When one of her former KCB corps members, Stephanie Greenwald, moved to Germany to dance with Staatsballett Berlin, Ms. Choules sent her boxes of leotards. Ms. Greenwald picked out a few for herself, sold the rest and sent the money back to Kansas City. Suddenly, Elevé was international.
The Staatsballett toured Japan, and “we did all kinds of fun prints and mesh, and we were very colorful,” Ms. Choules said. “The Japanese girls loved them. We had a huge Japanese following from the beginning.”
A couple of years ago, Ms. Choules and her husband bought a 10,000-square-foot building in midtown Kansas City, and expanded to about 35 employees. All custom orders are made there, as is part of a recently added ready-to-wear line that is sold more than 100 stores around the world.
Notwithstanding her purchase of a Gerber DCS2500 computer-controlled cutting table, most of the manufacturing is still done by hand on industrial straight-stitch, serger, and cover-stitch machines for better stretch and durability. Custom leotards start at $67 and can run to more than $100.
“We wear multiple leotards a day, depending on what we’re doing and if we’re sweating a lot,” said Abigail Sheppard, a first soloist with the Finnish National Ballet, who has worn Elevé since 2014. “It’s important that they last, because dancers don’t make much money.”
Kansas City had a thriving garment district from the early 1920s until after World War II, but now there are few skilled sewers in the local labor market, so virtually all Elevé’s sewers are immigrants; many are refugees from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
One of the few men in the atelier is a human Rosetta stone, translating instructions into Farsi and Dari; Pashto, Urdu and Hindi. Other sewers come from Central America, Syria, China and Bhutan.
Even with the help of Rightfully Sewn, a charity that trains and places refugee seamstresses, Ms. Choules can’t find enough skilled workers. After trying out dozens of United States factories that all supplied samples with seams that wouldn’t stretch enough or fabrics from mismatched dye lots, she found a Chinese manufacturer that now produces some of her ready-to-wear leotards using the same materials, machines and techniques as her Kansas City atelier.
Garments made in China arrive in Kansas City unpackaged, and are subject to the same quality controls, final inspection and occasional touch-ups as in-house items.
“I think most dancers are mini-perfectionists,” Ms. Choules said. “We fine tune every movement and analyze things — we have to, to dance professionally. I don’t want to say I’m obsessive-compulsive, but I am definitely a ‘That’s not right, I’m going to do it again’ person.”
Until a couple of years ago, most of Elevé’s customers configured and ordered leotards online, although dancers passing through Kansas City could shop at a showroom attached to the atelier.
That changed a little last year, when Elevé had two pop-up events in New York. Now Ms. Choules is in the final stages of negotiating a lease on a flagship store in the garment district in Manhattan.
Léa Fleytoux, a Parisian in her first year as a member of American Ballet Theater’s corps de ballet, is looking forward to it. “I knew about them before I got here, because I followed Elevé on Instagram,” she said. “I went to their pop-up shop both times and bought quite a lot.”
Now, she said, she keeps getting stopped in the practice room and asked where she got her leotard.
