Last fall, I paid a visit to the Met to take in the Costume Institute’s “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” exhibition. One piece that I felt immediately drawn to was a wool twisted dress by Proenza Schouler (which you can check out here). It somehow managed to be cozy/comfortable and yet also sculptural, and I really wanted to get my hands on one. Unfortunately, the designer version is over $1,000, so my only option was to do my best to sew my own dupe.
As I was viewing the exhibit, I had a vague recollection that I had seen some twisted/draped bodices that looked similar to the twist on the PS dress. When I got home it suddenly hit me where I had seen it — in the Japanese pattern books that were all the rage in the sewing blogosphere in the mid-2010s. I headed straight to my bookshelf and flipped through my sewing books until I came upon the perfect starting point for my dupe: top #4 from Drape Drape 2.
I dove straight in to tracing and assembling the pattern piece. Now I typically don’t use patterns from pattern books or magazines, and I quickly remembered why — because I really, really hate figuring out which line to trace from the hundreds of lines printed on the paper! This one in particular was tricky because there were four different patterns printed on the same side of the page, and there wasn’t much differentiation between the lines for each of the patterns (I’m not sure why they didn’t print the patterns in different colors or at least with differently-sized dashes and dots).
To bring the silhouette closer to the PS dress, I raised the neckline in the front to create a mock neck. I did the same in the back, even though the PS dress has a v-neck at the back, just because I thought having the high neck would make for a warmer garment. The final pattern resembled a large bat with a pointy nose:
I decided to make up a quick muslin from some white jersey I had sitting in my stash, just to see if the fabric would drape as advertised. Construction was incredibly simple: all I did was fold the fabric in half, serge along the shoulder and side seams, and turn under and finish the hem + edge of the left sleeve. I also interfaced the top 2 inches of the mock neck, then folded the neck over and secured the folded section at the side seams of the neck. The result is a very simple yet elegant draped white t-shirt:
After trying on the t-shirt, I decided to shorten the sleeves by about 2 inches (to make them closer to the cap sleeves in the PS dress) and add about 12 inches to the length, to make it into a dress. I then bravely spread out my delicious burgundy merino wool jersey (which I had been saving for precisely this occasion!) on the floor and got on my hands and knees to cut out the piece. Once that fiddly cutting part was out of the way, the construction of the top couldn’t be simpler — I simply serged the shoulder and side seams (leaving an armhole opening at the ‘pointy’ part of the pattern), turned over the edge and topstitched the armhole openings and hem, and interfaced and turned over the mock neck. It all took about an hour, maybe less, to sew up.
All in all, I’m happy with the finished dress, though I recognize that it’s not really an exact dupe of the original, which is much more form-fitting and has more of a ‘twist’ than a drape in the bodice. I still like my version though (especially as it cost only about 10% of the price of the original) and I’m sure I’ll get lots of wear out of it. In fact, to add to the versatility in cold weather, I’m thinking of making some detachable sleeves that I can add on colder days, when I want the extra warmth. I might even make the sleeves in some bright contrasting colors, such as hot pink, to give the dress some extra visual oomph. What do you think of that idea? Let me know in the comments…
