Dress #107: Charles James evening gown in green

This hand-stitched paper dress is based on a vibrant green silk satin evening gown created by Charles James in 1954. Both the Museum at FIT (accession 91.241.129) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2009.300.3522) hold versions of this gown. In addition, the Met has a toile of the dress design in black and white cotton muslin (accession 2009.300.796).

The original dress uses a variation of the ‘metacircle’ technique, where the starting point is a large circular piece of fabric with a small circle cut out of the centre. With a traditional circle skirt, which is the usual way the metacircle is employed, the circular hole forms the waist. James “experimented with innovative ways of placing and displacing the inner and outer circles in this basic pattern piece, on and around the body” (Long, p. 88). For this dress, the inner circle is shifted away from the centre, and the fabric attached to the basic sheath shape with the widest piece of the circle at the front left hip. The shape of the dress is reinforced with stiff buckram facing and boning in the both the bodice and skirt.

Charles James is considered by the Met to be the ‘only American to work in the true couture tradition’. His dresses were complicated constructions, many of them created through draping on the bodies of his customers, or using custom dress forms that combined the measurements of his customer with the fanciful contours used to sculpt the dresses into the desired shapes.

The dress is six inches tall, stitched by hand on 8x10 inch 100% cotton watercolour paper, which means that it will pop right into any commercial frame in that size, and be ready to hang on your wall.

Materials: Japanese paper and cotton floss on cotton paper; 24.5 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8")

Citation: Long, Timothy A., and Leonie Davis. Charles James: Designer in Detail. Hardback edition, V&A Publishing, 2015.