Dress #055.2: Charles James ‘Petal’ cocktail dress in green

This hand-stitched paper dress is based on the ‘Petal’ cocktail dress, created by Charles James in 1951; the original, in pale green silk, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2009.300.334). In my version, pale green mizutama tissue layered over a shimmering pale green paper to give depth to the colour.

Charles James produced a number of different versions of his Petal dress, both as a ballgown, and the shorter cocktail length seen here. The first Petal dress was created in 1949 for socialite and social activist Millicent Rogers, and reinterpreted in further colour palettes. In addition to this cocktail dress, the Met holds a Petal ballgown in lime green silk velvet and ivory silk taffeta; the Chicago History Museum has a version in black silk velvet and satin, and ivory silk taffeta. James also created a stole using a similar shape, made of black silk-rayon velvet and white silk satin.

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, Japanese mizutama tissue, and cotton floss on cotton paper; 24.5 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8")