Couture Beadwork

As I mentioned previously, along with creating my own designs, I also do custom embroidery and beadwork for other designers.  One of my favorite classes in school was a couture embroidery class where I learned to do tambour embroidery.  Tambour embroidery is done using a tiny crochet hook called a Luneville hook to create a chain stitch. The technique can be used with various types of thread or it can be used to attach beads to a background fabric.  It's faster than embroidery with a needle and is used by couture artisans in various studios in Paris and India to create couture embroideries for the haute couture houses in Paris, Milan and New York.  The most famous studio to practice this technique is L'Atelier Lesage in Paris which is owned by Chanel but does couture work for many other couture houses besides Chanel.

Last summer, I worked for designer Maria Korovilas creating amazing metallic encrusted pieces for her Spring/Summer 2011 collection that showed in New York in September 2010.  Here are some pictures of the work in progress as well as the finished pieces.

  

This was the first piece I worked on.  It's the front hem of the dress below and this one piece took me two weeks to finish.  The "beads" include everything from washers and various tiny plumbing and hardware pieces as well as metallic and metallized plastic beads and sequins.  The easy part was getting all the big beads in place.  The not so fun part was the hours upon hours we spent, filling in all the holes in between the large beads so that the whole piece was completely covered.  The dress is made from Battenburg lace tablecloths that were cut apart and pieced into the dress below.  Maria's whole collection consisted of Battenburg pieces layered over and under chiffon with beaded accents.  

These are little cap sleeves and since they were very small, they only took about a week to finish.  

This was the front hem of the dress below.  The piece was very large and took about a month to finish.  This one piece probably weighed about twenty pounds and there was a similar though smaller piece for the back hem on this dress.

The final garment was featured in Women's Wear Daily!

The video of the fashion show.  

NEW YORK FASHION WEEK

Since NYFW begins this week, I thought I'd share this short video.  My alma mater, The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, is one of the few, or only fashion schools in the U.S. to show during NYFW.  I can't wait to see the work of this season's MFA students on Friday, February 11.  This video is only a highlight of a few of the looks shown during the Spring/Summer 2011 shows which were held in September 2010.

For those of you not in the fashion biz, the shows are generally held several months before the actual season to allow buyers to get a look at various collections and decide which lines they want to carry in their stores.  The designers then have a few short months to get the clothes produced and into stores.

Along with creating my own designs, I also do custom embroidery and beadwork for other designers.  At around 1:40 in the video, you'll see a couple of looks that are encrusted with metal beadwork.  These were designed by Maria Korovilas and I did some of the beadwork for her.  Maria's collection was very haute couture and simply amazing.  I loved working on it.  It was a huge endeavor involving a team of people, three to do the vast majority of the embroidery and another team of people to construct it all.  Most of the work was done by hand in the true haute couture sense.  The long vest you can see in the video was originally about three feet longer and dragged on the floor.  It took about two months to bead.  Unfortunately, none of the models were strong enough to walk in it since it weighed over 100 pounds, so Maria was forced to chop off the bottom of the vest, causing a few beads to fall off on the runway.  It was still beautiful though.  Tomorrow, I'll post more pictures of the collection along with some of the pictures I took as I went along with the embroidery.