Foundations Revealed 5 Senses Competition - dress diary part 2

First I had to find an image. I Google searched ‘5 senses painting’ and after playing with a few, Austrian painter Hans Makart’s “Die Fünf Sinne”, or “The Five Senses” caught my imagination. The oil painting, completed in 1879, consists of five panels depicting the 5 senses. The women are voluptuous and sensual, exactly how I see corsetry. I like the moody, fleshy colours, and I knew that when sewn together, they would loose the obvious visual of naked bodies and would transform into patterns and shapes altered by the minds eye. In addition, the fact that the painting was created in panels lent itself to the panels in corsets.

Hans Makart “The Five Senses” 

The painting is in the public domain as it’s copyright has expired, and I felt that along with editing, I could legitimately use the image.  I have played with using paintings on corsets, making the design in Illustrator, filling each shape with images, and to test the pattern matching, printing them on paper half scale and sewing them up to fit on my half scale mannequin (below). This time though, I decided to try it full scale.

Testing Half scale pattern matching and images. I made these half scale mannequins as they are really hard to buy in Australia and super expensive to import.

I am facilitated by kitsch religious imagery, and I love the colours.

The shape of the corset was really important. I wanted it to have drama, and reflect the feminine curves of Eve as represented in the painting. With this in mind (and also on the advice of Foundations Revealed suggesting defining a ‘house style’), I have started curving the bottom edges of my corsets, and it worked really well with the images.

Developing my house style: the curved hemline. C cup corset.

This corset is layered with vintage doilies, lace and the embroidery form a disintegrated silk shawl. I also worked back into the layers with embroidery thread. This is also trailing the B cup.

I have found over bust corsets more challenging to fit, so I push myself in the areas that I want to conquer. Even though the corset is covered in naked women, I didn’t want to the garment itself to be seen as ‘rude’ or smutty. The cups fully cover the bust and like flying buttresses, swoop up elongating the body and mirroring the long forms of the figures. The pattern is a variation of my most successful pattern that I worked on for 6 months. I scanned the original pattern into Illustrator, and made the changes digitally. I toiled the shapes in calico until I was happy, then imported the painting and used masks to make each panel. It was quite tricky getting the pattern matching working as there is so much detail and the panel shapes are quite curvy.

Initial design stage.

I printed the pieces onto regular paper, and was faced with the thought that if I was going to try it on, it would need to be stronger. I had a roll of Visofix, so it seemed logical to bond the paper to calico, which was very easy to do (except that the iron removed some of the printing ink, so needed to use a pressing cloth!).

images: printed paper then bonding

Printed on paper.

Bonding to calico and cutting out ready to sew!