Samurai Ballerina

I am one of 10 fashion designers competing in the "Beyond the Armor" fashion challenge sponsored by the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Garment Guild.  We were given a private tour of the facinating "Beyond the Armor" Samurai exhibit at the DIA, and challenged to design garments inspired by what we learned and saw.

Here is my final design!

I was inspired by 'Reeds and Cranes," a silk painted folding screen painted by Suzuki Kiitsu.  He was trained by a powerful Samurai artist named Sakai Hoitsu, who adopted him and elevated him to the elite Samurai class. 

New York New Dress

I bought this dress for $10 at thrift store and gave it a makeover!  

This is the first dress I've made in New York! I don't have a machine here yet so it was all done by hand. 

Does This Dress Impress-ionst You?

This is another color theory dress I made showing "optical mixture:"

Photo by Megan Marcoux
Hair and Makeup by Natalie Briles
Model - Kara Thomas

I was inspired by the "Impression Sunrise" painting by Claude Monet to create the batik fabric for this dress.

TransParent Trap

Ready for some color theory?  Here's my "Transparency Dress!"

Release the Hounds(tooth)

We had to design a main pattern and two coordinates and then map it onto something for my pattern design class...so I made a dress and two dog sweaters!  Totally normal!

Making things like this keep me from going totally crazy from stress...or maybe its the stress that makes me make these crazy things?  Either way, I'm really tempted to make these outfits for real for my senior show, its just so silly and cute!

Here are some close-ups of the patterns:

Two weeks to go until the end of the semester!

Felt Up

My beautiful friend Monica modeled one of my dresses for me this weekend!  

The top is made of hand-made felt.

So fierce!

Claude Monet's water lily paintings were the inspiration for this dress.

Dressing Table Dressy

This is another outfit I made last semester! 

The pink dress is shibori dyed silk and the robe is silk organza with embroidery details:

I made it for my "Art and Artifact" class, where we went to the Edsel and Eleanor Ford house and got to choose anything we wanted as inspiration for our piece.  I picked this 17th century French dressing table:

This table is so beautiful!  The top opens up where there's a mirror and compartments hold powder for wigs.  

This table comes from the time of Marie Antoinette, who was was an inspiration for many of my pieces last semester.

Batik

Despite the burns, toxic fumes, and long hours, batik was my favorite class I took last year.  Here are some of my fabrics!