Gustav Klimt inspired dress

Created by Jen Pierce and accessories by Lauren Rose (Jamie Greer helped with the finishing details)
Modeled by Alex Klintworth

The inspiration

 

The Art to Wear Fashion Show to benefit the

Burroughs and Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, SC.

 

 

My first attempt!

So every designer has to start somewhere. Mine journey is beginning at the Art to Wear Fashion Show in Myrtle Beach, SC. I found out about this event from one of my past art students. We decided to enter the show together so it wouldn't be such an intimidating undertaking. Lauren has a strong mixed media background and I brought to the project some "basic" sewing ability in that I've made a few quilts.

 
Our Design

One of my favorite artist is Gustav Klimt. I've always admired the painting of Adele Bloch Bauer. So I decided that would be my inspiration. My sketch flowed right onto the paper. It would be a dress with the fabric quilted together. My next dilemma was where would I get all my fabric from. Since we go to yard sales almost every weekend I thought I would see what I could find at them. I was able to buy lush, textured pillows and drapes for $1 a piece.  

Then I needed to find a model. Enter Alex Klintworth. I tried to use my friend Melissa-Anne's vintage dress form seen below, but it was a little crazy for me to work with.

I tried pinning up some of my fabric (pillows), but I really wanted something I could pin into.

 



So this is the dress form my father got me for my birthday!!  Thank you daddy!!



My next plan of attack was to figure out my pattern. (Don't forget that this was my first attempt at ever making an outfit so I was winging it. My only reference for how to make a garment was watching every season of Project Runway.) It was an epic fail ready to happen.

 

Once I had my plan I was ready to fall back on my strength...quilting. I came up with several designs that would be blocked out in different sections of the dress. My first plan of attack was to make the trimming.

Well, I must have worked on this for a few days (mind you I am a full time art teacher with 2 children and a husband so I couldn't devote my full attention to this...LOL) I wasn't seeing a lot of progress so I figured that's because I was focusing on such detailed part of the dress. I wanted to switch my focus to the larger panel rectangles that would make up part of the skirt.

 

Finally, some progress! I was getting really excited because it was looking very elegant and definitely looked inspired by the painting. From this point I switched to the top piece because each of those rectangles takes about 5 minutes to sew with all the sequins and ribbon.

The red triangles were made from a thick drapes. The circular beaded part was a nice detail I ripped off of a set of brown drapes. I really loved this process of re purposing my yard sale findings.

This is the point when Lauren Rose started really working on the project. I gave her a pile of junk jewelry I'd been collecting and told her to embellish the sash. She is truly amazing. All those pieces are hand sewn on! She was ripping apart purses, and smashing rings, and pieces were flying everywhere. That same night she made all of our accessories for this dress (shoes, earrings, a ring, necklace, and a bracelet).



Lauren's collection to match the dress.

 

Up until this part in the creation almost everything had gone smoothly. I'd been sewing on my grandmother's 1950's White sewing machine. You almost had to crank it sometimes to get it moving, but it still has a lot of years in it. It was really fascinating for me to think about how that machine literally created most of my mother's childhood clothes and now I am sewing my first dress on it. I swear there were moments were my mom and grandmother were right there with me sewing on my dress. My major meltdown came from an email I received. There hadn't been a lot of communication about I deadline. I just figured it was due the night of dress rehearsal. WRONG! I got an email saying it was due a week earlier. So I had three days to finish up the dress! It really sucked because Lauren and I had been working diligently. So...we started rushing and cutting a few corners. All the rectangles would not have sequins. It was 2:30am the morning that it was due and this was the scene at my house.

When we tried to connect the skirt to the top the dress wouldn't fit over the sewing form anymore which meant I wouldn't be able to get it on our model! My only thought was that I didn't want to have worked 30+ hours on this dress and then it not be able to be in the show because I couldn't meet the deadline. I made the decision to go to bed and try to rig up a wrap skirt during my planning period at school. Once 10am rolled around I called the Art Museum to talk to the lady in charge of the fashion show. She was so glad I called. I was the only person she didn't have a phone number for so she has been unable to let me know that they changed their minds and wanted the artist to hang onto the dresses until dress rehearsal. OMG!!!   I was so relieved and also so pissed off all at the same time. If she was able to email me before couldn't she had done that again to communicate with me?
Well, with one more week to wrap up the dress I called in my sister-in-law, Jamie, to help me figure out a better solution for the dress/skirt. Jamie did some invisible thread work, fixing up some important details. We were able to attach the skirt and add some ribbon for the hem. It was finished!