Dress #108: Charles James evening dress in black and turquoise

This hand-stitched paper dress is based on an evening dress created by Charles James in ca. 1955; the original, in black velvet and blue-green satin, is held by the Museum at FIT (accession 91.241.132). The most striking feature of the dress is a three-foot long metal zipper that spirals around the gown. With only a low resolution image to work from, I couldn’t identify the path of the zipper, but it’s there, somewhere!

I’ve chosen a Nepalese Lokta paper for the black velvet portions, as it has a rich depth and shine. The turquoise is a decorative machine-made paper.

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: Nepalese lokta paper, decorative papers, and cotton floss on cotton paper; 24.5 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8")