Dress #114: Charles James dinner dress in golden brown

This hand-stitched paper dress is based on the dinner dress created by Charles James in 1952; the original is held by Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2009.300.213a, b).

Charles James uses spiral draping to wrap a ‘metacircle’ around a narrow underskirt. The form is maintained using the natural stiffness of the brown taffeta.

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