week 2- dress

This week's garment was a dress and my team and I decided to work with clear PVC fabric. The inspiration for the dress I made was the fabric it's own. PVC is a waterproof material so i thought of making a functional dress, waterproof against rain, in the best way I could. Starting, I made cut a pattern of a simple A line dress fitted to the body, but decreasing the centimeters on the lower hip.

The next step was the decoration of the lower part of the dress. I thought of the shape of an umbrella, and how I could use this shape for the advantage of the dress, so I turned the shape upside down and this automatically created some kind of big pockets all around the skirt. I cut a circle on a blue pvc fabric and separated the centimeters in exact same parts, then i sewed it around the dress. Then I cut and added two sleeves, a blue and a stripped one with blue and clear pvc.

The next step in the creation of the dress was adding a hood. I had never before made a hood so I created my own pattern as I had first looked at hoods in my closet. I wanted to decorate the dress and that's how I came up with the idea to use in my advantage the invisibility of the material. So I experimented by putting many colourful threads on a square piece of clear piece and one more over the first one. I sewed it all together in order to trap the design inside the material.I cut the shape of the hood and added it on the dress. finally I put a thin piece of fabric in it so that the person who wears it can wrap it around the head. The last step was to add a zip, which started from the middle back of the hood and ended in the lower back.

The dress was finalized and the show was about to start! Here are some pictures of my dress worn by the model.

My general comments about this garment:

I believe it worked quit well as an idea and it came out exactly as I imagined it but it had a big technical mistake, this was the size and particularly the lower hip. The fact that I reduced the centimeters because I wanted it to be fitted on the body, made the area become really small in the end, so that no hip of a size 8-10 could be able to fit in. The result was for the seam to rip of the that area. I think that this dress could be called fashionable in its own way, as it was different and fresh, as well as humorous but I could only imagine an extreme singer of celebrity in it. For an opening I used a big zip that started from the middle of the hood and ended on the lower back, which I think was right on the top in order for a head to fit in but wrong on the lower part in which case the zip should have been longer.The next time I could improve my pattern cutting skills especially for the hood and the sizes. For the making of this dress I used 2 meters of clear pvc whic costed me 3 pounds a meter, and 1.5 meters of blue pvc which costed me 6 pounds a meter. Both fabrics were sourced at borowick ltd at Berwick street,London.