I made this costume for a contest, if you want to check out the final result or the details of the contest (you can vote for your favourite creation!), you can go to my Allegory of Autumn by Mucha post, or to the competition website.
I have always admired the beautiful flowery godesses painted by the Art Nouveau genius Alphonse Mucha, and dreamed of seeing one of their dresses come to life. After many long months of work, I was finally able to make that happen! Here is how I did it.
This is the allegory of Autumn, and she has a heavily embellished dress that seems inspired by byzantine formal dresses, as well as 1830's sleeves. She is wearing a headdress with chrysanthemums, and holding a basket of fruit. She is also carrying a thyrsus, or the sceptre of Bacchus, with a pine cone.
The first task was to imagine what the back of the dress looks like, and make a pattern. I chose a flowy white jersey fabric, and put together a pattern including the sleeves from an 1830's style dress and an edwardian-style skirt, flared at the back.
I couldn’t find lace that resembled the pattern on the front of the sleeves, so I drew a pattern on my computer and laser cut it out of black fusible interfacing.
The way I interpret the dress, it is made up of several pastel colours put together. I therefore decided to make all of the colours myself from my white fabric. I am not an expert with dyes, and I was therefore very careful not to go too far with any colour. However, looking back, I think i could have put a bit more colour.
The front decorative strip has many shapes in several colours that were probably embroidery or appliqué, but I decided to make them with overlapping layers of my fabric stiffened with interfacing, then held in place with iron-on strips. The shapes are numerous and complicated, so they were also laser cut for precision and to save time.
During this time, I found acrylic cabochons in the corresponding red and blue to apply to the dress and weathered them to give them texture. I 3D-printed several types of settings that I sewed onto the dress to recreate the distinctive shape around the gems. The edges are finished with white wood beads that are sewn to the fabric, and the headband has larger jasper stones.
​The accessories were a bonus addition, but also a cool adventure. I found a pine cone exactly like the one in the painting on Etsy, and mounted it in a broomstick I carved into a tapered shape. The leaves are from my neighbour's vine. For the headdress, I went to my local florist who ordered the chrysanthemum flowers in the exact colours we wanted and showed me how to mount them to the headband with wire and florist’s tape.
For the costume contest, made a 60 second video with the construction of this dress:
This was such an awesome adventure and I am so happy with the result!