Challenge 8 - The Kish/Erte Inspired Outfit

I love this challenge, just the study and research is great fun. Putting it into practice and creating the required garment is quite something else.
Where do you start when you have to chose one (or more) images?
The outfits and illustrations are superb.
Well, I have to start somewhere so here were the illustrations that inspired me the most.

In this illustration, I love how the whole thing has a sense of movement. I like her headband, (hmmm, could use that!) I like the dramatic contrast in colours and the swirl of the dress.

In this one, it is the use of the peacock and the way he is holding the dress up. Peacocks feature in many of Erte’s illustrations. I would like to see this outfit actually made, but think I would miss out the spoon type jewellery!

This one is another joy in drapery, I like the flow of this one and the bodice, which is quite unusual for an Erte garment as he went to great pains to liberate women from the corset.

Another masterpiece in drapery, I imagine it would be almost impossible to recreate something like this in miniature, you wouldn’t be able to get the volume or the weight scaled down, which is a shame.

This one is very elegant and very “wrapped”, the only thing that gives it any shape is the bindings around the waist.

Now this one I really like, and has probably influenced me the most, I love the “statuesqueness” of this, and the illusion of height given by the length of the dress. It has very clean and simple lines, the shape of the garment is given only by the figure wearing it.

The skirt on this one is out of this world and I SO want to recreate the wrapped look around the ankles, again the peacock is making an appearance!

I like the way the front is twisted and draped on this one, I also like the headdress but I think any doll wearing it would more than likely keel over! (Again a peacock motif on the front!)

Well, coming up with a design is so difficult, not that I haven’t got any ideas, probably quite the opposite, I have too many and can’t decide on one thing! Whaterver I choose I want it to be statuesque and very grand.
I have settled on the peacock theme. It is Natures way of showing off, and if she reckons those colours work, who am I to argue??
So I chose a peacock print cotton fabric, this is lovely it has the peacock tails worked into the pattern, the colours are very vivid and it is highlighted in metallic gold.
Then there is the beautiful watermarked silk fabric, it combines all the right shades of blue. Silk drapes fabulously on scaled down designs, so that should give me the draping that I will need. The gold fabric will give me a good contrast to the silk but it is quite stiff and will not drape, it also frays like a demon, so I will have to be careful where I use it. Then the last print is a matching print that goes really well with the other peacock print, it uses the same colours but just has the little eye patterns.

I want this design to be dictated by the fabric. I am going to have to try not to tailor anything, Erte's gowns all flow, and are more about the drape of the fabric rather than anything tightly fitted or certainly NOT made to measure! Measurements will be difficult for this design anyway as I do not have a doll to fit to. My aim will be to have a one size fits all outfit.

My main fabric will be the silk, it is really lovely pure silk, the watermarking on it looks as though the fabric is wet and dripping just like water. It also has quite a large pattern which I think will be lost on an outfit this small.

(If you need silk to make a dolls outfit, don't waste your time looking in fabric stores! Go and look at some headscarves, these are usually made in lovely fabrics, often with a small pattern scaled for dolls, and ther is enough fabric in a head scarf to get a doll outfit made.)

Anyway, I am hoping for the overall look to look like flowing water and express movement, just as so many of Erte's illustrations seemed to do.

Right then, now for a design, where do you start???

This was my initial idea, I really like the idea of having the wrapping working it’s way round the body and crossing over at the bottom, but it needed something at the waist to give it some shape but when you add a bodice to it, it starts to look very complicated and oriental, hmm!

This was my next idea, very draped, but now it is starting to look medieval! I am having real problems getting this to look contemporary I seem to be going even further back into history.
I am determined to get those twisting straps in there somehow!

Next I decide to make it all out risqué!
This one would need a whole load of toupee tape to keep your modesty! But still it isn’t contemporary enough. Now it looks like she just walked out of a harem!

Right, time for a radical turnaround!
Forget the straps round the skirt, I’m not going to be able to make it work, so I will just rethink the whole thing.

Time to go back to the chosen illustrations and take the bits I like the most and leave the straps! The trouble with this challenge, is we don’t have the doll to work with. Nothing can be perfectly fitted and sizes have to have a bit of give and take. All this had to be taken into account, so my design became rather…well, ...adjustable!

These were a few more designs that I came up with, slightly more contemporary, but I’m still not happy with them. With someone like Erte or Poiret, whose designs were so fabulous, it is difficult not to completely absorb yourself into their style and go all the way into a period outfit.

After I’d looked back at my chosen Erte illustrations, these designs came out, the coloured design was the one that I finally chose.

This design worked really well for me as it is completely adjustable, so it will fit just about any doll that goes near it! Also it captures the elegant draping that I wanted to achieve, the length didn’t matter as it just kind of ends in a puddle around her feet, which also disguises any stand that the doll may have.
The shoulder straps slide through the strap at the back so that the shoulders can be adjusted to fit.
My outfit, I think, would look equally as good on today’s woman, it is almost timeless, flattering and shapely. It flatters all figures both large and small in a way that I really didn’t expect. If the fabric hadn’t behaved as well as it did I would have been looking at a full blown maternity gown!

I wanted to make as much of a feature as I possibly could of the peacock feathers in the fabric design, so I cut out around all the feathers in the “tails” to give the proper peacock shapes. These were trimmed with beads and sequins to give it a rich shimmering jewelled look.

To keep the “adjustable” theme, the hat also had to be one size fits all. I may be being a little ambitious here as there is a vast difference between a Tyler doll and an Ellowyne! But, it had to be done! In the end, the hat is a simple strip of lined fabric, shaped at one end into a fan, this had the very end beaded along the edge. The other edge tapers to a point and has a beaded tassel on the end.

I very nearly didn’t include the hat, I had completely mixed feelings about it. However, it did “go” with the dress and without it, the dress looked a little lost. I read through pages and pages of Vogue and was assured that these turban type things were indeed very fashionable, so that kind of swung it and the hat was included!
I wish I had taken a picture of the dress before I had soaked and shaped it. There is a lot of fabric in the front of the dress, it is cut in a very strange way to make it drape correctly and gather properly through the loop of the strap.
I had to just go ahead and make it, and just BELIEVE that it was going to do what I wanted it to. The trouble is before it was shaped, it stuck out in all directions and looked for all the world like a very bad maternity frock!
Talk about holding the faith!!
But once it was thoroughly soaked and shaped, everything fell into place and it started to look pretty good, very statuesque!

I had an almost overwhelming urge to make bracelets for the doll and have strings of beads running from the bracelets to the outer corners of the peacock feathers on the back of the dress, but this would have dated it far too much!! Long gloves would also have worked really well, or slave bangles but again these would have dated the outfit.
Restraining myself was very difficult!

This challenge is a complete turn around, in that, it takes you completely away from the strict tailored guidelines and measurements and all the fuss of actually making an outfit. It just lets the fabric tell the story. You don't have to know a thing about sewing to be able to do this.