Hello sewing lovers, curious creatures and passers-by! My new studio is finally up and running, and I am up and running too, sooo time to blog about the making of my creations, and I'll start with the most (in)famous of all: The Pizza Dress.
Yessssssss! It is the Pizza dressssss! Kids love it! Grown-ups love it! I love it! And my mum loves it too and that's all that matters!
So this is pre-Covid (ooooh how innocent pre-covid times seem now, don't they!), 2019, and my customer was Chicago Town Pizza. I'm sure you know this brand of frozen pizza if you, like myself, had been a student who lived on frozen pizza and Kinder Bueno from the garage next door. It is actually really yummy (this is NOT a sponsored blog by the way, but if you are reading, Chicago Town, feel free to sponsor me as well :) The dress was offered as part of a prize in a competition, if you won, you won a pizza-themed wedding and a honeymoon in Chicago, with as much pizza as your guests could eat and doggy-bag it even. The pizza dress was made for the bride to wear at the wedding, although I never got to see pictures of the real wedding unfortunately, but we had a photo shoot at the Manchester Hall, a beautiful historic Art-Deco venue in Manchester city centre, with two lovely models who were actually married and pretending to get married for the shoot. Very Funny (insert laughter noises here:______).
The inspiration for the dress was Rihanna's mockery in the press after wearing the stunning Guo Pei's cape at the Met Gala, which unfortunately for her, and fortunately for me, looked like a massive pizza.
I designed the print from real photographs of melting cheesy pepperoni pizza, and got the cotton satin fabric custom-printed for it. The crust was handmade in latex and hand-painted by me, but could have not happened without the latex crash-course implemented by an angel fallen to the Earth by the name of Tsubi-Du, who happens to be also my platonic wife and the most talented costumier I know. Thank you Tsubi, this dress would have not been so fabulous without your valuable knowledge!!
This is the illustration I made for it, but then when I was making the dress, I made a couple of changes so that is why it looks a bit different, although I reckon it looks much more striking on the model than as a drawing. My first idea was to make the crust with faux fur, which would have given it more of a stuffed animal look, in keeping with the Rihanna's cape mockery idea, but I ended up going full-blown literal, and "realistic" (aren't frozen pizzas made from something that comes from oil, anyway, like polyester...?), and seriously, the model looked like she was coming out of the pizza covered in melting cheese.
You either love it, or hate it.
I think the real bride hated it, hence there is no pictures to prove she wore it at her luxurious pizza wedding. Hey, you, bride who wore a pizza dress at her wedding, if you are reading, I'm sorry...not sorry....!!
...And lastly, take a minute to appreciate how majestic the pizza dress can be.
Here there is a picture of the dress almost finished, in my lovely old studio (snifffff...) looking absolutely gorgeous, against the Manchester sunshine reflected by the classy Printworks building through my window.
(Are you a picture-blower-upper like me? If you are, maybe you have noticed in the background a terrifying white mannequin head sticking up? Yes? That is the remaining of a 1920's display mannequin that my friend Jez found buried in his garden. The body was there too, only badly scattered and mushy, but the head....oh the head....I saved it and now it models bridal veils....I know it is creepy but I love it....Anyway, that is another story!)
I hope you enjoyed finding out about my (in)famous pizza dress as much as I loved creating it. At one point it was all over the TV, the newspapers, the internet. It had its 5 minutes on (in)fame, you could say. And I managed to make it without stuffing my face with real pizza, hahaha, even though that was all I was thinking all the time! Kudos to me!
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