Creating a designer-inspired dress

Like so many people, I fell in love with the Oscar de la Renta floral mini dress that Taylor Swift wore to the 2021 Grammys. I loved the organic beauty and romance of the embroidered flowers climbing the dress, and the blend of 3D elements with 2D embroidery. I also loved the shape – it felt like a contemporary romantic take on a mod silhouette, and there’s nothing I love more than mod silhouettes.

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So when The New Craft House held a Spring Fling party in 2023, I decided to take the opportunity to make a version of this dress for myself. I didn’t want to make a literal copy – I had a traditional 60s A-line shift in mind. Something that would also be a little less restrictive to wear, and accessible as it wouldn’t need fastenings. I also knew that I would personally want more dense embroidery for coverage, as I didn’t want to sew a slip to go underneath.

My embroidered fabric was sourced from Etsy but I gather that you can get similar fabrics on other sites. I ordered 5 yards because I knew the embroidery would be sparse in parts and I would want more fabric to make the dress have higher opacity. Pattern-wise, I went straight for the Adrift Shift by Gracie Steele. I made a few toiles of this and knew it fitted me well and had the shape I wanted. However, when I cut my pattern pieces out in the embroidered tulle, I realised that I was going to need to do something to give the dress structure – the tulle wouldn’t hold the A line shape at all. So I went on a journey and learned about underlining. I did research and settled on silk organza; not cheap, but I don’t handle synthetic fibres well and this was meant to be a knockout dress that I could wear on future special occasions. Underlining worked like a dream – the pattern pieces held their shape wonderfully.

Once I’d attached the tulle pieces to the organza pieces, I then set about embellishing the tulle layer with additional flowers, as the embroidery on the tulle was more sparse than I would like. By sewing these onto both the tulle and organza layers, this had the added benefit of strengthening the underlining so that the layers didn’t separate or bag – they were thoroughly attached.

All in all, I cut the embroidered flowers out of the remaining 3 yards of tulle, and hand sewed them onto the dress using invisible thread. This was LABORIOUS! I spent about 8 hours cutting out flowers and 20 hours hand-sewing them on. I chose to add the additional flowers so that the effect was dense at the bottom of the dress, getting slightly sparser moving up (although still giving good coverage over underwear) and then had more mesh on show at the shoulder.

The final technical finish was to bias face the armscyes, neckline and hem with pink satin bias binding that wouldn’t be obtrusively visible, but would encase the raw edges and provide a clean finish. I wanted to keep the organic, romantic elements of the original dress, so chose to add flowers over the neckline, armscyes and hem – I didn’t want to cut the flowers and have clean lines as I felt that would look more artificial.

This was one of my first forays into technical manipulation of fabric. Underlining is a process which changes the structure of the fashion fabric by using another fabric to alter its drape and weight. It’s a very useful technique, and one I’ve used again on another Adrift Shift to keep the A line style lines whilst using a drapey fabric. It is a little tedious as you need to anchor the two fabrics together with rows of hand-sewn stitches across the pattern pieces, as well as machine sewing them together at the edges. But in this case, this dress would not have had the same impact if I hadn’t underlined it.

And how did the finished dress come out?

It came out great! It was everything I’d hoped it would be, and I felt amazing wearing it. I’ve since reworn it for a special occasion, and it felt just as special the second time around.

It was incredibly empowering to realise that I could make something that was so involved – it’s one of my biggest ever projects in terms of time invested, but every hour hand-sewing was worth it. It’s awoken a desire within me to make more involved and technically complex garments, and given me confidence that I can make the kind of clothes that I would love to be able to afford.