Dear Pina Bausch

Dearest Pina Bausch,

They talk about you with a kind of reverance I could not understand. Then they showed us this:

To perform in this dress might give the impression that one were even a fifth as electric as this remarkable artist:

(Stretch fabric, white or very pale blue- same colour elastic bands.)

All my love,

Dear Bloom (Dress 29)

Dearest Bloom,

Once upon a time you were a lovely (yet inhumanely expensive) fabric store but several hundred metres from my house, and then came some sort of Mother-of-the-bride crisis, where Greek and Italian ladies no longer went to tailors, or required your exquisite hand-beaded extravagancies, and began buying boring things in satin. with shoulder pads. and the occasional sequin.

In memory of extravagancies, and in the event that I ever use the babillion fabric samples I picked up from the pile left on the nature strip when you closed.

(My post-passover drawing skills do not do justice to the monochrome fading that was meant to occur... Technical specifications: matte silk on a cotton shift.)

All my love,

Dear Modcloth (Dress 28)

Dearest Modcloth,

I wish I did not know you exist, lurking, in the internet space where I could one day spend my money (if I ever had any to speak of) But looking at your (frankly Gorgeous) dresses did give me the idea for today's dress, so thanks... I guess.

All my love

P.S. For some reason formatting has gone kablooie... I will endevor to fix this somehow...

Dear Joan Holloway, (Dress 27)

Dearest Joan Holloway,

An inspiration to curvy gals everywhere not to dress like those stick figures they (rather annoyingly) get to advertise clothing lines inspired by your look....

(via: this is london.co.uk, L-R, Paula Ke, Victoria Beckham and Marks and Spenser.)

All my love,

Dear: Shakers, Alannah Hill, and Kate Winslet (Dresses 24, 25 and 26)

Dear Shakers,
Your strange and secretive sect brought together craftspeople of various inclinations. One of my favourite of the shaker inventions; the bent-wood-box, often finds its way into my designs, less blatantly, or sometimes:

Dear Alannah Hill,

Your new-romantics style influenced roses bag was so crowded- lovely materials, lovely idea, but it seemed a waste; what about the gorgeous subtlety of your dresses perhaps?

Dear Kate Winslet,

All the trash mags are fascinated to rip your personal history apart, which i think is cruel and unnessecary; but it does mean they have rather a lot of pictures of you in the latest 'thing'; regular fabric interset with lace panelling- so i thought i'd have a crack at the new genre...

wish me luck?

All my love,

Dearest Flu (Dress 24 tomorrow)

Dearest Flu,
You make me feel like death, so I will post tomorrow.
no love,
IP

Dearest Mario (Dress 23)

Dearest Mario (Dress 23)

You're turning 21 this saturday! And since you're wonderful (and wonderfully strange), you're having a Toga Party (which should be fun). Seeing as I havn't any togas lying about (surprising really... I have a ballgown, a velvet bodysuit, an oversized tutu, but no toga.), I've been thinking about what i'll make, which (as inspired by the hooded-flowing gown I saw on Charlotte Kemp Muhl in a magazine today at work) turned out something like this:

(headband affixed hood, two grades of mesh, one elastic-blend under-playsuit)
All my love,

Dearest Federation Square (Dress 22)

Dearest Federation Square,

Passing by you on the tram, delirious with the current illness that seems to have everyone in it's grasp, I gaze at the gorgeous panelling, remeniscent of the beautiful panelling on antique planes.

(via johnnyjet.com)

Which reminds me of the absolutely STUNNING original 1960's Ford Falcon belonging to the greengrocer, distressingly bad condition, except for the perfect hood ornament, a flying aeroplane/stingrayesque shape...

(via taillightking.com)

And then, we have the 'no hangers here' dress:

(sorry about the poor quality of the image. I'll do it later when I feel better.)

All my love,

Dear MadebyRAE (Dress 21)

Dearest Rae,

Because I’m designing every day, I've been coming to realise there are certain design-crutches I lean on- I'm very prone to dress-specific printing (particularly in dresses 19, 15, 6 and 3) and over-the-top stiff-shaping that wouldn't really be practical. What I love most about your designs is their utility and simplicity- they apply to all types of fabric patterns, so if you find something that you really like, you can make/buy it in various patterns. I bought two different prints (blue and silver flowers
 ,and red and gold stripes) from the upholstery centre near my house (5$AU for 2m. they must be insane!) and I've been thinking about what I could make out of them. Then I saw the Buttercup Bag (Made by Rae, via: The PomPom) and all was revealed:

(Dress specs: heavy upholstery fabric, satin lining, rubbery band on top of the bust-line to hold it up)
All my love,

Dearest Long Lost Friends (Dress 20)

Dearest Long Lost Friends,

You remind me to look forward- the past's been awesome, and the present's hot stuff, but the future... that's where it's at.

(Please take nothing I say today to be of much consequence. Cider FTW.)

All my (slightly inebriated) love,

Dear Edward Craven-Walker (Dress 19)

Dear Edward Craven-Walker

You utilised the fascination that is the contact between unmixable substances (in your case oil and wax, in mine- oil and water.) and created something that was a symbol of a generation. I used to have one as a small child- although I remember most of the appeal being that it was warm when I was reading and got cold hands in winter. Nevertheless!

All my
,

Dear Monash Radio (Dress 18)

Dear Monash Radio,

You host wonderful parties, full of people dancing exhuberantly unimpeded by embarrasment or fear. There is wonderful conversation to be had, and inspiring dresses to be seen. Therefore:

(Black mesh for the shoulders/sleeves area, Aluminium discs (2cm Diameterish?) sewn; scale-like on a satin-lined cotton shift.)

All my love

Dearest Frankie (Dress 17)

Dearest Frankie,
You're whimsical and fun, and unfortunately, you always run off the shelves so fast that i can't have a quick scan of the sweet and the silly. Oh well.
As summery weather quickly deserts us, here is the last of the spring picnic frocks.

(Cotton with applique in fabric and ribbon.)
All my love,

Dear Chekhov (Dress 16)

Dearest Chekhov,
You're REMARKABLY boring. It does not help that the lecturer looks like a marine biologist. Maybe next tuesday you'll get a dress with a turtle print or lizard scales or something. It would not surprise me: anything to distract myself from the brain-corroding boredom of this class.
I'm not particularly pleased with how today's dress turned out- it was meant to be more opulent and ridiculous, but I think i'm saving that for something Mcqueenesque and/or Baroque in the coming week.

Costume for one of his silly-girl characters. The upper portion of the flower is held in place with a choker-style ribbon tie. Muslin and Silk.

All my love,

Dear David Behar-Perahia (Dress 15)

Dear David Behar-Perahia.
Your gorgeous works captivated me at the Beit Ticho exhibition in early January, and have rested on my mind since.
http://ww.imj.org.il/exhibitions/2009/VideoDrawing/Bhar-Perahia.html
Today's dress mixes the physical act of drawing in time to music, and the act of drawing on the human body- the dress will be tight, with the contours of the lines drawn on in chalk, and then printed on with fabric paint.

All my love,

Dear John Noble (Dress 14)

Dearest John Noble,
You're a wonderful actor, and your portrayal of the (admittedly jackpot) character of Walter Bishop in the enjoyably silly/serious Fringe is a pleasure to watch. Particularly of interest to me is Walter's obsession with sense-memory (a passion I share) and his attention to detail, particularly in Season 1 where his attentiveness to the unique 'fingerprint' of a specific typewriter lead to a major plot revelation...
In honor of antique typewriters, with a footnote to Lee Alexander McQueen:

(Screen-Printed Cotton, black mesh patch for the " on the back/shoulderblades.)

All my love,

Dear John Gould(Dress 13)

Dearest John Gould,

I first experienced your research into birds when friends of the family, emptying out a warehouse they'd just bought, came upon a tattered, watermarked copy of your 'Birds of Australia' (I'm not sure which volume)

(Image credit: National Library of Australia Archives.)

The pages were stuck together and yellowed with age, but I remember gazing with some awe at the faded drawings (meticulous and strangely pretty- your wife's hand.). Today's dress would be printed with a pattern borrowed from those same meticulous drawings: perhaps a tawny frogmouth?

-Black heavy cotton, with a printed fine mesh back/capelet/ruff (all one piece.)-

All my love,

P.S. Sorry for the dreadful image res. I'm at the bf's house, will re-post later.

Dear Friday Night (Dress 12)

Dearest Friday Night,

You are a strange and elusive creature, prone to the bizarre, the wonderful, and the just plain stupid. Tonight's entertainment brought to you by the irritating couple sitting next to us, who were explaining to the waiter that they'd spent some time in japan and that the establishment he works at is really just 'cosmetic food' and not the real stuff... Because you're a real authority- Man who wears sunglasses at night. Douchebag extrordinaire.

Anyhow.

This work is a direction i'm looking at going in- dresses with architectural hints- yesterday's corsetry somehow blended with feathery textures and owl-tawny-colours. Let's see where this takes us, shall we?

All my love,

Dear Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin (Dress 11)

Dear Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin,
One of you, I think is hilarious. The other- not so much (could have something to do with the cruel and unusual massacre of one of my favourite plays ever... Cruelty to Rostand: IP says no.)
My point: 1/2 awesome, 1/2 awful, to the power of Academy Awards= pure butt-kissing-hollywood-schmoozing-BOREDOM. We get that Meryl's amazing. We get that you hate Zac Efron and Whatsisface Lautner because they're youthful. We get that ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE who got nominated needed to be mentioned and fauxcomplimented... Even Neil Patrick Harris, song and dancemeister extrordinaire was boring. How is that possible?
But it gave me time to look at the pretty dresses, and the bending motion of the song-and-dance number Vegas Showgirls' fans inspired the corset-boning in the back of this dress.

Off the shoulder burgundy crepe with architectural (metal) boning to enhance the curve of the back.
Now: Alec, man up. Stick with 30 Rock, that's your forte.
All my love,

Dear Bree (Dress 10)

Dear Bree,
You were wearing a lovely pinafore at uni the other day, and it got me thinking about that lovely cut, and a whole lot of vintage-thrifting-blog-reading got me thinking about oversized bakelite buttons...
Ta Da!

All my love,

Dearest Ovid/Ted Hughes (Dress 9)

Dearest Ovid/Ted Hughes,

I was reading your short story (from Metamorphasis) about the abduction and Rape of Proserpina and the mental image of 'She was heaping the folds of her dress with flowers' meant that all day my ideas involved grecian inspired dresses and using Kansashi Flowers (Japanese fabric flowers) to 'spill' flowers down the front.

This is a two-tier meshy material dress, with full circle skirts and piping on the bottom hem to accentuate the fullness of the skirts. There is a headband attatchment that has a ribbon (possibly wire-structured?) to 'spill' the Kanzashi through the hair. below the bust (the two lines of flowers from left and right that meet in the middle) are attatched directly to the dress.

Kansashi are an AMAZING artform, really delicate and pretty- but fiddly and difficult to make. I'm yet to perfect it, but I plan to do some serious folding in the next little while.

Vivcore has a phenomenal resource page where she posts the extreme old-school Kanzashi she makes:

The occasional Pop-Inspired arrangement:

And tutorials, with step-by-step photos.

Hurrah!

(Tutorials FTW. Some tutorials planned for ImPrint in the next little while.)

All my love,