SATING CASTINGS

MORE ABOUT SATIN CASTINGS

Most of the inspiration for this garment came from wanting to try a new technique—casting bronze pieces with intricate details, and figuring out how to attach them to a garment well. It was a massive experiment filled with a lot of trial and error and led to me also experimenting with mixing geometry and the organic lines of the body. I think my experiments with mixing organic and geometric shapes are going to continue long after this project, but overall, I'm fairly happy with my larger geometric pieces filled with abstracted organic lines. (And I think my experiments with attaching metal to fabric will continue too.) While it definitely didn't turn out exactly as planned due to construction limitations I discovered during the process of creating it, I think the results are pretty wonderful!

I created this look from double-faced satin and bronze casts. The dress itself is patterned from scratch. It's a princess line with a slight train to the skirt and it's a relatively simple for the sake fo showcasing the metal pieces adorning it. It does however have the slightly unusual choice of having seams at the waste on the the front and back panels but not the sides. That is both for the aesthetic value and to better hide the horsehair interfacing understructure that exists only underneath those panels to support the metal pieces.

The bronze casts were created from a more complicated process. I started by sculpting base shapes in clay, making molds of that and re-casting them in wax, and finalizing them with a little more sculpting in wax. Then I created spru structures out of wax work and encased them in silica ceramic molds. The molds were fired and wax drained before pouring molten bronze into them. When the bronze was cool, I broke the molds apart and cut the pieces from the spru trees. I finished them off by sanding the backs down with an angle grinder and adding a French brown patina with ferric nitrate and a blow torch. To attach them to the dress I drilled holes in key places and sewed them on like buttons.