Draping Technique

Alga Marina Dress

Alga Marina Dress's design inspiration was from an Italian designer, Elsa Schiaparelli.
Her designes were mostly influenced by her collaborators, with artists such as Jean Cocteau and Salvado Dali. Anyway, please see my construction process below.

Construction Process

1.
I started with the muslin, played around with the draping on my dress- form, and trimned it into the desired shape. Then I transformed the dress to my final fabrics. The light weight satin and organiza.

I created an interlining with horsehair, in order for me to put boning into the bustier without changing my design lines.
I rubbed the top of the boning to make it dull then applied tape on top of the bonding to prevent it from poking through the dress.

3.
My first bustier was twisted, even though everything was cut on bias and with extra layers’ underneath. Then I came up with a feasible idea to solve the problem.
With my second bustier, which is my final, I stitched 1” apart with straight grain and cross grain to stabilize the layer, then applied organza bias strips.

4.
Then I draped the bottom part and played around with the organza, because it would drape diffely when cut in different direction. (It was fun to see how they reacted differently).
After experimenting around the drape, I decided to go with straight grain and trimmed the width, then I used two needles narrow to roll hem with the edge with “Nylon” threads.