I’ve been feeling particularly reminiscent as of late, so I thought a throwback Thursday post would be the  most appropriate outlet.

In a recent interview, I was asked what my biggest challenge back in my styling days was. It wasn’t hard to tell the interviewers that it was making an impromptu dress on set… In my previous blog, I titled the post “Recipe for a dress”. 2 hours, 1 pair of chopsticks, 1 meter of fabric and 456323  (not literally) safety pins later, I completed the dress. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to prepare for it but I couldn’t really.

The shoot was actually for a photographer who wanted pay homage to a W magazine editorial featuring Anne Hathaway. I was given very specific idea as to what the photographer had wanted to see on the model. She wanted to see this dress.

She had given me one image to work from, and admittedly, it was a bit difficult to derive something from a dress that looks like a white bed sheet tied miraculously into a standing, graceful bow. I knew that this wasn’t going to be a dress that I could find in a store or pull from a rack – this was going to be my time to shine! As my knowledge of sewing is non-existent (save for sewing like a pro in straight lines), I thought that I was going to take a stab at draping and safety pinning the dress – which I did end up doing.

This piece of fabric was what I had chosen in the end…My apologies for the wrinkles , but this was taken after the shoot, after I had painstakingly retrieved all the safety pins from it. I knew the shoot was going to be monochrome, and so grey was the colour to go ; the more important factor was the sheen of the fabric and how well it reflected light. I spent a good hour in the fabric store comparing and touching fabric rolls before I found this.

Here we are, the work in progress, before I had finished tweaking the bow. I’ll have you know that the two chopsticks behind the bow were still dignified and not broken into several pieces to make this bow so perky. I’m not ashamed to say that my dear model Hailey went through quite a bit of hurting for this dress (much love to this beautiful girl).

                                   Photographer: Willow Nova @ Willownova.com
Make-up Artist : Joyce Yeh

The finished result…It took two hours of sweat, blood and self pricking, but I was able to wrap our model in the illusion that is this “dress”. Homage paid and creativity birthed, this shot was a witness to one of the greatest challenges that I’ve faced on set.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this throwback…It certainly made me miss my photo shooting days!

Much love,

Vi