Dress #56.2: Charles James cocktail dress in blue-grey

This hand-stitched paper dress is based on a cocktail dress created by Charles James in 1949; the original, in blue-grey silk, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2009.300.200). My first version of this cocktail dress used a black paper patterned with gold; I’ve since become much more obsessed with using paper that evokes the original fabric. This version used a Nepalese lokta paper with subtle shimmer.

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