Making a dress

I thought it might be interesting to document the making of a single piece from the Spring collection, so for the next week or so I’m going to write about the steps required to get a dress made.

The piece above (made using 2 equal squares and some organic cotton cord as trim) was part of the Spring 10 runway collection that I showed last September.  I sold 8 pieces of this style, an incredibly small quantity that ordinarily wouldn’t get produced by most companies.  But if 8 women want to wear this dress, then I’m thrilled to make it for them.  I sewed the sample in my studio myself for fashion week, but because my sewing machine is now nearly dead and my sewing skills are not as good as they could be, I decided to have it produced in a sample room in NY.

Fabric:

This dress is made from Ahimsa silk, which is 100% silk that has been produced without killing the silk worms that make it.  The fabric for the sample was a leftover piece that was given to me by Eviana of Bodkin. Because most fabric producers require a minimum order quantity that far exceeds what I would need for 8 pieces, I was a little concerned about getting fabric for my orders.  Then my friend Bahar Shahpar saw the sample of the dress and told me she had some leftover yardage of the same fabric from a previous collection (the truth is, despite the fact that there are a lot of great sustainable fabrics out there, we all seem to gravitate to the same ones each season!).  So with the original sample and 16 yards bought from Bahar’s leftover stock in hand, I showed up at my sample room in New York’s garment district with my 8-pc order.

More about trims tomorrow…