Kingston woman dresses Wimbledon champions (From Your Local Guardian)

Kingston woman dresses Wimbledon's tennis champions

7:20am Wednesday 6th July 2011 in Wimbledon By Louise Robertson

A celebrity dresser is jubilant after another successful year dressing Wimbledon’s female champions.

Elisabeth Piner, who owns Kingston-based dress hire company Having a Ball, has been dressing competitors for the Champions Ball for the past 20 years.

The special honour began when the All-England Lawn Tennis Club asked her to provide dresses to the players for the closing event.

Since then she has had the privilege of dressing big tennis names such as Steffi Graf, Virginia Wade, Jana Novotna, Serena and Venus Williams.

This year, she provided dresses for newly-crowned Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova, who beat Maria Sharapova in the ladies’ final, as well as the ladies doubles champions and senior doubles victors.

She also dressed the junior winner and doubles junior champions.

Each year she takes about 100 dresses, from a host of designers, to the club for the women to choose from.

She said: “The girls all looked fantastic this year and it’s great to see how good they all look. It does get very manic, but it’s worth it when they walk away happy.

“As soon as a woman comes in I usually know what’s right for them because I know my dresses so well.

“Often people come back to the first choice that I gave them, after a few hours looking.”

Petra Kvitova wore Jenny Packham, who recently dressed Katherine Middleton, but a huge list of designers are available from Vivienne Westwood to Amanda Wakeley.

Mrs Piner said: “I’d been watching Wimbledon throughout the fortnight and she was getting through each round.

“I just knew from watching her what dress I’d put her in.”

Mrs Piner dedicates hours upon hours selecting the very best to take with her to Wimbledon, and also takes her own make-up team to pamper the tennis stars and ease the stress.

For the rest of the year, she hires out dresses for a variety of events, with the couture prices starting at £85, with sizes from 8 to 22.

Visit havingaballdresshire.co.uk for more information.