Draper- Athene Wright
Stitcher- Madeline Gibbson
The Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC received a grant funding an arts based research project. As part of that project, the museum’s curators wanted physical recreations of objects that appear in two dimensional artworks. The item I brought to life was the dress and requisite undergarments that appear in Eugène Grasset’s 1895 work “Avril”. The garments will be displayed on a live model for a special exhibit in the spring of 2023.
Compared to contemporary fashions, clothing drawn in the style of Art Noveau is often more Greco-Roman and tends toward diaphanous gowns lacking in structure. This stylization serves the romantic quality of the artwork but lacks the research based integrity the museum required. To bridge the gap between art and history, I developed a design plan using a blend of historical research and Art Noveau sensibilities which suited the museum’s needs perfectly.
As a starting point, I explored a few classic staples of costume research: The Cut of Women’s Clothes, Patterns of Fashion, and Corsets and Crinolines. Not finding closely applicable garments in any of these sources, I turned to primary research in the form of the historical costume archive held by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill known as COSTAR. During this phase, I found a dress with similar qualities to the one shown in Grasset’s painting. Then, using muslin and pins, I carefully copied the major pattern pieces from the extant dress to use as a basis for my project pattern.
The choice of corset design to be worn underneath the dress was also complicated by the unusually natural shape of the original gown. A look through secondary sources failed to unearth corsets that produced the effect of bust separation clearly seen in the original image. I turned to more unorthodox sources of costume information, finally finding a reference to an appropriate corset in the past listings of an auction house. This original, on which my corset is based, was manufactured in 1894 by The Schilling co. as a sporting corset.
The gown consists of a chiffon over-layer and a lightly boned under layer. To create the fashion fabric, I designed a repeat of the Taurus motif and had it custom printed onto chiffon by a local company. The decision to intermittently invert the motif and reduce the directionality of the fabric was made as a compromise to the budget.
The corset is made from a single layer of English coutil flatlined to a silk shantung. The front panels are quilted to a medium weight stiff stuff. Due to the current shortage of Prussian tape, the bone casings are a woven ribbon. The bones are a mixture of flat and spiral steel. Creating this corset was an excellent lesson in patterning historical garments for body types that are underrepresented in existing patterning books. In addition, the model’s feedback was invaluable to my understanding of how to conscientiously create costumes for larger busted performers.