How to make a wedding dress - Part 1

One of my friends from childhood (we did orchestra together growing up), Katrin, messaged me on Facebook a while back about doing a custom wedding dress for her. We messaged and e-mailed back and forth and finally in early January, she came to my house in Westchester where I was at the time to start the process.

I took her measurements, and we looked at photos she'd printed out as well as ones online to try to figure out what she wanted. She liked avant-garde designers like Issey Miyake and wanted a more non-traditional dress. She had an abstract idea of what she wanted -- she liked the neckline of the purple dress from Spring 2010 along with the wrapped tulle skirt we did for my knits shoot. She also wanted folds or tucks in the skirt of the dress.


She wanted a relatively simple dress that was wrapped with tulle or organza in a way that appeared "accidental." I started with a couple of loose sketches and she chose this as our starting point for the quest to come up with the ideal dress design.

The notes in all caps are hers. When I received the sketch she chose, I tried to come up with a more concrete sketch while I waited for her to send me more clippings concerning the color palette and other details she found.