I want to make a Goth Haute Couture mermaid dress that is made of checked tweed with a combination of black lace, beading work, black ribbon and maybe some leather, studs and chains. It is going to be a wild dress! All the materials you see are left overs, so I am cleaning up my working place at the same time ;-). I still need to buy meters of black ribbon, black spool of thread, a black invisible zipper and black beads.
In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that I can not sketch, so I traced the body from a fashion drawing book.Then I draw the dress with the details shown (my own creation).
The dress itself will be made of checked tweed. On the sleeves you see some flowers at the lower part. That lower part of the sleeves will be made of black lace. The sleeve caps will be pointy, something I never made before, so I am very curious if they will look like I want them to be. I also have another sort of black lace ribbon. That will be used for the upper part of the turtle neck. The turtle neck itself will be made of black fabric/leather/ribbon and will have some beading work. To make it more GOTH, I will add strings of beads around the neck, so it will look like a necklace. The dress will have the shape of a mermaid so the lower part of the dress will be more slimming at the knees and I have to make two circles of checked tweed. Around the circle there will be black ribbon. Maybe there will be some beading work around the two circles too. I can not guarantee the dress will look exactly like this because I feel the dress can have MORE details on the upper part of the body(from neck to waist). Maybe that part will have black lace too (partly) and some beads, spread at the shoulder parts.
The Peplum belt will be made of checked tweed too, but the middle part will be made of black fabric or black ribbon. Hmm....Maybe it will be the other way around: The peplum belt made of black fabric and the middle part made of checked tweed. What do you think will look nicer?
To get the desired design I needed some inspiration. It took me very long to get this design.I am not a fan of copy paste unless I want to copy paste intentionally. I have these amazing fashion magazines that mainly contains images of Haute Couture. The magazines I bought in a book shop but they are imported either from Spain or Italy. The magazines on my table are just 1/3 of my collection :-).
They are very expensive in the Netherlands :-(, they cost around 11 euros each, in the early 2000's. I really wonder how much they cost now. These magazines I bought when I was still studying fashion. When you are a fashion student, you need to have rich parents or have a part time job because you need to invest in magazines, fabric, printed pictures. I don't have rich parents so I had to work, which I don't mind at all. Luckily I had a job in an Indonesian restaurant and got a good salary to be able to purchase those magazines. The magazines include images of designers outfits like Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Emanuel Ungaro, Versace and many more.
For the neck part I took my inspiration from this outfit.
Probably I will do some beading work ON the dress too like this, but just a little bit.
Pointy shoulders to make it look WILD. I am not sure how the patterns of the sleeves need to look like. In my pattern books I have not seen any sleeve pattern that will give this look. So I have to figure it out myself how the patterns will need to look like.
Maybe I will attach a string of fringe at the inner part of the sleeves to make the dress extravagant!
I made a red satin blazer before and this dress will take much longer because of all the details and beading work.
If you haven't seen my Dtube 3D earrings yet, you can still check them out ;-)
