It was a faded, discolored, shattered, fragile, dilapidated dream dress. And I wanted one. I think it’s my favorite project to date, partly because of the epic timescale. I fell in love with it in 1996, and made it in 2013. Yep, seventeen years from initial inspiration to completion. That’s often how it goes.
Some projects spring forth fully formed in the mind. The fabrics are there in your stash, and you drop everything and go to work immediately because you’re SO inspired. Two days later, behold the fruits of creativity unleashed! Most projects, however, don’t go like this. Most are slower. Some stall and get re-started, and some projects take a decade or more to come together. Sometimes your ideas are way ahead of your resources… but patience might bring the resources you need.
It’s hard for us nowadays to imagine just how grand the House of Worth really was.
So extravagantly rich were some of its patrons that they only wore their impossibly lavish Worth gowns once or twice…
So what happened to these clothes after they were cast off by the hoi polloi? Sure, a few ended up in museums, but you gotta wonder – what happened to the rest?
By chance, I tracked some of the Vanderbilts’ clothes down this week… and in the most appropriate, yet unlikely place. It seems that some of Worth’s work made it all the way back to the county of his birth – Lincolnshire, in the UK – under the most delightfully ridiculous circumstances!
A 1977 book on a dusty shelf in a Cotswolds hotel gives us the full story….
You might make a lovely dress or corset from a reproduction pattern, and that’s great, but what if you could go deeper? What if you could look over the shoulder of the premiere at Dior’s atelier in 1955? What did they do differently from us, and why?
Like a curious five-year-old, try to ask “why?” just one more time than the next person. For example… why is the bust of this Dior evening gown so small?
Follow along as the Internet hive mind figures it out from primary sources… with surprising results.