Only In Dreams

At the beginning of October I helped a good friend of mine, Kevin Boothe, with a photography/design project he was working on. Kevin, a highly talented designer, and Matin Pezeshgzad, photographer extraordinaire, worked together on this project to create some incredibly beautiful images. My role? Provide some garments for the shoot. My stylist friend Adeline Yu worked on this, pulling garments that might work well with a projector. In the end we used the muslin for my Atmos dress, which proved to be a great canvas for digital projections. Check out some of the images as presented on Kevin's excellent design site Document (www.documentmagazine.ca) by clicking the image. Enjoy!

Beauty in High Park

High Park in Toronto has a nice little section of Sakura trees, or cherry blossom trees, that only bloom once a year in late April/early May. This past April I had a yearning to wander amongst the pretty pink blossoms and pretend that I was on vacation in Japan, or even Washington, D.C., enjoying the trees in full bloom. On a whim, I asked my amazing photographer friend Landon Speers if he would be up for an impromptu fashion shoot amongst the ephemeral blooms. In a day we managed to pull together a great team that had Landon's good pal Warren Hrycun assisting with photography, the lovely Brae Mason handling makeup/hair, and the beautiful Deirdre Buryk modeling my silk Atmos Dress. The saturated cobalt blue really stood out against that backdrop of pale pink flowers, I am super happy we did this while we could! One of my favourite things about the day, aside from spending it outside in the beautiful park, was the number of park visitors who began taking snapshots of what we were doing! We became something of a tourist attraction at that point, which actually ended up adding an interesting element to some of the shots. Here, check out some of the behind the scenes photos along with the real dealios.

Make-up party with pain au chocolat and strawberry strudels.

Landon taking some test shots.

Staging a shot in 2 parts (I'm floating!)

Attracting an audience.

How to put a model in a tree while wearing silk... this is something like Step 3.

Quick! Get a shot with the train!

And now the real deal:

Atmos Dress

The major project of my semester was designing an evening wear dress. Yup, things move pretty slowly around here - almost a whole semester for one piece! Pretty boring I guess, but for the record we were draping something different every week. Anyhow, the dress was due the day after the John James event (see previous post), which was kind of good, as it forced me to get my shit done well before the due date. You should have seen the madness of the lab that day.

6PM, if your dress was not on the rolling rack in that room before it was wheeled out of the room, you didn't get a grade, and your dress would definitely not be in the 2nd/3rd year fashion show. Seconds until that rack was rolling out the door students were frantically sewing on buttons, hammering rivets, and sewing final seams for each other. Even though my dress was done, I spent the last 10 minutes wrestling with hangers, trying to get my long dress to stay on 1 or 2 hangers, and managed to almost miss the rack! They were moving towards the door as someone finally yelled at me to get my dress on a damn rack, and I joined the handful of ladies chasing it as it wheeled out the doors. Phewf. That was close.

Well the fashion show has come and gone, I've received my marks for the dress (I did well!), and now it's time to arrange a professional photo shoot with this dress. I love it, I must say. It's another versatile piece made of this really light, gorgeous silk that moves like water. It's a halter dress, with a layering top skirt that can be tied around the waist or around the neck. The top skirt can also be tied as a dress in itself, in at least 2 different ways, so I guess you have a total of at least 5 looks built in with this baby, but actually, many more. Can you do the math? And as always, I'm taking orders! Enjoy.

Inspiration board - Satellite & Aerial Photographs of Natural and Atmospheric Phenomena.

Watercolour - one of several illustrations created of the dress.

On the runway (tied incorrectly, unfortunately).

Appliqué detail.

Down the runway at the Arcadian Court.

More photos will be posted in my forthcoming Serpentinata post.