Corporeal Carcass

Bringing back and taking away

The essence of sorrow and joy

Rising from the fresh scent of decay

With vengeance and wrath to destroy…

We were given an assignment in college before our couture gown module to make a miniature size gown for a Barbie doll... the excitement that engulfed us girls is beyond words. I remember growing up stitching, pasting, gluing clothes on my Barbie dolls which me and my younger sister had a combined of say over a 100 of them. It transported all of us back to that. Well the guys didn’t have much to say. I remember one of my classmates, a guy of course holding the doll by her hair and making her fly with her gown: O. INHUMAN… we were given a designer and we had to make our work look like theirs. I was ecstatic to get Elsa Schiaparelli as my designer.

Keeping in mind her style of work I came up with this theme. I worked around a few key words.

•Larger than life animal print

•Drastic change in silhouette

•Bare

•Break

•Transform

•Surreal

•Stark 

Although an assignment but I realized how difficult it is to make clothes in miniature size. They did this exercise in the Victorian era. The designers at that time made a miniature version of the gowns that the aristocrats wanted to get made in the same fabrics and colours.

I made two gowns in red, black, white and grey. They are slim body hugging sensual gowns with hand painted motifs on them with thigh high slits. Elsa loved bustles so I gave them detachable bustles to add drama.