DECONSTRUCTED GARMENTS: Balenciaga Umbrella Dress

Lately, I've been looking for bigger challenges to try out with my vintage/second-hand/retro finds. I read about Jill Danyelle a while back, when I first got my sewing machine and reading up on her now, I'm completely inspired by her work. Focusing on architectural designs that integrates dynamic style, sustainability and some fine hand work, Jill, with skills picked up at The Fashion Institute of Technology and Parson's School of Design, turns ordinary fabric and discarded object (such as umbrellas) into garments that demonstrate the feasibility of having both fashion and do green living. Her first foray was a dress made from umbrella fabric. In her own words:

I had wanted to make a little black dress from umbrella fabric and now that I had some confidence behind the sewing machine, this was the perfect opportunity. With rain predicted in the forecast, I put out a call for people to send me their broken umbrellas. Then one blustery, rainy day, I walked home across Manhattan collecting broken umbrellas. I continually stopped on the sidewalk, snipping the fabric off of the mangled frames, receiving random odd glances from passersby and, finally, just taking whole umbrellas. I was shocked by how many I was coming across. By midway home I was completely loaded down!

Inspired by the inky black "fabric" and the bubble silhouette Balenciaga popularized in the fifties, I set myself to work drafting a pattern. When it came time to cut, I laid the pattern to let the many existing seams of the umbrella work to provide interesting and subtle geometry to the dress. I recycled a black sheet to use as the facing of the neck and armholes and utilized a vintage belt at the waist. The dress has a side zipper and two snaps at the right shoulder.

Image: Jill Danyelle

While this dress is what caught my eye, her other work for the fiftyRX3 project--which documents her outfits for each day for a year, comprising of at least 50% recycle/reused articles of clothing and design experiments that look at the life cycles of clothing and consumerism--is just as brilliant and inspiring. Her designs reminds of the ideas that inspired Miguel Adrover's work, that fashion is as serious and dynamic as you let it be.

organic cotton men's shirt dress * umbrella bag