If you have an atelier/bespoke business, you can have doubts like this:
Is this fashionable?
Should I make this kind of dress/skirt/jacket for my clients?
Maybe it’s a bit outdated?
Giambattista Valli has an answer to this question.
Look at these 3 red dresses from from his collections.
Will you be able to guess when this or that dress was shown? To tell the year and the season? Maybe not very quickly.
And you know what?
Very few people can:
1. An experienced fashion editor,
2. A client who visited all his shows,
3. A member of Valli’s team who made this dresses.
Because they are all pretty contemporary and we can wear them all right now (I mean when we will party again).
These dresses are, from right to left, from fall 2011, fall 2012, fall 2020.
You learn how to make the same type of dress as the 3rd one in our Bustier Dress Course.
And what about the skirts on these black dresses?
They are, from year 2005, 2017 and 2020, all fall season.
15 years between the first and the last, but honestly, would you say that the left one is less fashionable than the right one?
Of course no. They are all beautiful.
And do you notice one thing?
YES.
The CUT is THE SAME.
They are all gathered skirts.
And what about these dresses?
They are from 2007 Spring ready to wear, 2015 Resort, 2015 Spring ready to wear.
Do you think that they are very different?
No, the cut is, with some variations, strictly the same.
They are short Fitted dresses.
And the skirts on these dresses are the pleated skirts with big hollow pleats.
Maybe you prefer the right one, but only because you know, that flowers are everywhere now.
Speaking about flowers. Look at these images, from Valli again.
Maybe the first dress (on the left, if you read this on the big screen), seems a bit familiar to you?
I bet you see dresses like this everywhere now. Maybe you’ve even seen a very famous brand from US doing a lot of these this season, with lemons, flowers, etc, etc…
The only thing is that Valli did it… in 2014!
NO – this dress is from 2014 fall couture, meaning that it was shown in the beginning of the 2014, and created many month earlier.
The second one is from fall 2017 couture and the third one, from Spring 2015 couture.
Wouldn’t you agree that the 1rst and the 2nd dresses, with 1 year difference between them, have strictly the same cut?
Why am I writing all this?
To tell you the truth. There are NO trends in evening wear and bridal wear.
You can make whatever you want. If you follow the right process, if you have a great pattern, your cut will be beautiful for DECADES.
Of course, everybody may suddenly want to make bustier dresses with a sleeve element, or shorter skirts, or longer skirts.
Or put flowers or lemons on the dresses because everyone is longing for the nature.
But patterns, the base of the garment, stay the same.
They don’t change, because each human being has a body with a waist, two legs, two arms.
Of course in 20 years, women will be a bit taller and will have more of…well, you understand.
But the proportions, the standards, are the same.
A beautifully cut garment = a perfectly made pattern.
You only learn one time, and then you will make beautiful dresses from different fabrics, shorter, longer, more fitted, less fitted… for years.