Persephone: Custom-dyed historical costume
For the third year in a row, I've chosen to enter an outfit in the Foundations Revealed contest. The current theme is "renewal", and the brief asked us to look at sustainability, recycling, and upcycling in our creations. The image the site is using to mark the contest page is of spring blossoms, and immediately made me think of mythology, life cycles, and specifically Persephone. I very quickly decided not to design a corset for myself this year, and instead chose to focus on two types of historical dress: an Ancient Greek chiton and one of my sartorial obsessions, the Fortuny Delphos gown. Fortuny's proprietary pleating still has people swooning over a hundred years after it debuted.
My design concept has morphed a bit based on how my organic processes came out, but has largely stayed true to my desire to dip dye a cotton chiton in handmade, eco-friendly cochineal dye and use pleated silk lame for my gleaming pleated creation. I also knew early on that I wanted to find a way to work symbols of Persephone, seasons, and cycles into the design, and did so via the Four Seasons belt. (slideshow below)
belt-spring
The cycle aspect is represented by it being a circle around the body. The seasons are represented in four sections of the belt leading to each other and back again, and all feature hand made silk flowers, hand sewn beads, and are made of items from my stash. The element included as reference to Persephone is the hand embroidered & beaded silk organza death's head moth & pomegranate at the center front of the belt, based on artwork found online by an unknown artist.
In addition to the belt materials, almost every other material was also repurposed from my supply collection, or recycled from other objects. The cotton muslin I dyed for the chiton was purchased new, but the gold silk lame I pleated was purchased second hand from costumer and historian extraordinaire, Elizabeth Emerson, along with other gold silk fabrics used in the entry (leaves on the belt, for instance). As an aside, Elizabeth has an absolutely phenomenal collection of antique and vintage supplies, garments, and accessories from around the world. Click her name to view some of the awesomeness she has cultivated and get more info about the lace museum she's curating! The lace applique at the neckline of the gold under gown was in my stash, as was the white fabric used as the base for my belt.
Kintsugi-Persephone
The pomegranate seed tiara features garnet beads as the seeds (from my bead stash), a re-purposed bridal headpiece for the rhinestone leaves, and the plain gold leaves were taken from a headband to become the front of the tiara.
cabbagetestswatches
Sustainable dye: Before choosing to use cochineal, I tested an all food-safe pigment on swatches of 100% cotton and a cotton-silk blend. The first photo in the above slide show presents the swatches a day or so after they were dyed for 2 hours at a simmer. Based on the fugitive nature of the food-based dye, I instead chose to go with cochineal dye, hand ground & mixed, mordanted with alum, oak gall tannin added for depth, and pH modified with vinegar. Kipp Inglis, a natural dye/textile artisan graciously provided guidance & supply assistance as I researched & created my project, and I was thrilled to accept their help.
After an 11 day dip dye process, the muslin show significant degradation in darker areas of dye, and was as brittle as fallen leaves, so I applied kintsugi principles to patching metallic gold fabric into the damaged areas. According to Wikipedia, “As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.[5]”. This seemed apropos for the contest theme but also to some degree applicable to my own life & sense of self over the last few years. “As a philosophy, kintsugi can be seen to have similarities to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an embracing of the flawed or imperfect... Modern artists experiment with the ancient technique as a means of analyzing the idea of loss, synthesis, and improvement through destruction and repair or rebirth” As an experiment, I also soaked some un-scoured items in the dye bath-- sinamay millinery straw, silk habutai flower petals, cotton twill tape, a nylon millinery veil, and silk thread... But that's a project for another day!
I set myself a goal to finish my project in time for Halloween, and as such, I was able to wear this outfit three times prior to taking photos for the contest! If you made it this far in my adventure, thank you for reading. Now for the actual photos! Location: Goodyear Heights Metro Park, Akron, OH; photographed by Brandy Reed. Hair, makeup, costume design & model: Maeri Certo/Certain Sundries
kintsugi-persephone-back
Comments