How I Made It: 2021 Pride Gown
This Pride dress took me two years to make.
I began in 2019 with a sketch I made that was inspired by poofy tulle gowns, and also an interest in muscled men in corsets. This actually was about my own muscles in dresses; I have never fully done drag, and I consider myself a cross dresser. While my butt receives many compliments, I generally think my upper body frame is my strongest feature when I wear apparel, and I like the gender play that comes with putting a feminine garment on a masculine frame.
My first thought was fully tulle: In addition to an explosion of it at the waist, the upper half would be a fitted, structured corset with pleated rainbow colors covering it. I had not ever made a corset, and my only experience with princess seams two years ago was a 2016 Halloween costume of Queen Cersei when she blew up the sept. I started seriously reading about corsets and watching how-to videos after the 2015 Cinderella, as many of us amateur seamstresses did. I really wanted to make a version that fit me just like Lily James but maybe also with lights.
I enrolled in draping class not long after at CCSF, purely to get out of the house. Many friends hear “draping” and think draperies and home furnishings—lol—but it’s actually the practice of pinning fabric on a dress form, human body or mannequin, and playing with how it hangs, and making patterns from those creations. Here I significantly grew my understanding of how fabric was made, the differences between grain lines, and how those altered the fit of a garment.
It’s also where I met Paul Gallo, who I recalled recently his first words to me when he walked up. He strolls over with a class attendance sheet and gives me a once-over look. I was wearing my floral overalls and I’m sure a hyper happy grin that looked like I’d snorted 3 lines. “You sew?” “Yes!” I said. “I made these overalls!”
“Okay: Go get a dress form and set up back here.”
In the weeks that followed, he continued to critique my work with a watchful but fair eye, and I learned a lot. Then we came up to a corset-making part of the class—something I hadn’t expected—and I thought how great, maybe I’ll get to do my Pride dress after all. Then the pandemic came. The last in-class tutorial I attended turned out to be the corset. We never made one, but put muslin on a form so that it fit, an exercise called “pinning for presentation.”
Then my mask business exploded. I briefly held out hope I’d still make the dress and hired a seamstress to handle the stress of production. In the end though, I was exhausted. I wound up at a small Pride party with basically nothing to wear and wrapped a rainbow flag around my waist. It was hands-down my laziest look in six years.
Many months came and nothing special happened, then Paul and I started talking again. He wanted marketing and social media assistance, and I wanted to utilize his masterful draping and pattern-making techniques. It is a collaboration, but it’s realistic to say that we hired each other to accomplish very specific goals. People often approach me for “collabs” but that’s an essay all its own: Many of them want free things because they love what they see. That isn’t what Paul and I have; We help each other. I also buy him things, I give him fabrics. I plan on hiring him directly down the road for couture local red carpet looks, should my column keep going. I am grateful for all this and consider him a friend as I write this today. I think we are a lot alike, and I began aspiring to be more like him the more we work together. But the collaboration part still has specific utility for us both.
He draped a corset on me earlier this year as a demonstration for a Zoom class, and through that made a denim sample.
From there I began buying up different vinyls. My imagination for the corset at that point had evolved to jewels. This was perhaps first started by a TA in draping class who suggested it, and me being the queen of sparkle just really latching on from there. Then I started collaborating with Kate Tova, whose art pieces and murals often have hundreds of high-end jewels incorporated in them. In our conversations, she asked me for a jeweled mask and referred me to pieces she’s seen by Christian Siriano, who is one of my top inspirations in apparel today. I also often thought of The Blonds, a New York duo who make crazy bejeweled garments for celebrities. I became aware of them after they bought my disco helmet in 2015 and put it on Miley Cyrus; Yes, that’s how that all started.
The vinyls were meant to hold the jewels with glue. In the past couple months I purchased 1200 of them, most of them wholesale from Kate, and then lots more from Jeff Bezos. I knew the corset would need more structure to keep the jewels on, so I put the stiffest interfacing I could and paired it with boning. The boning was a chore all its own: I had bought metal stuff on recommendation from Fabric Outlet, but when I went to cut it, the wire cutters really wouldn’t get through it. I ended up ripping out boning from a Halloween costume a couple years ago when I went as Ashley O.
The first corset failed, and that was only a few weeks ago. Paul made me a pattern from the denim corset he draped, and I constructed a vinyl version with extra seam allowance. I figured I needed it to put in the metal boning, but then there still wasn’t enough back there to make a channel. I added thick canvas as a channel and stuffed the Ashley O plastic in there. I think the biggest failure though was just my carelessness with the pattern pieces. It was super easy to reverse them, and because this was made to specifically fit my body, the final product had pockets of air where it should have been skin tight. The lining was likewise installed wrong and pulled oddly at the front of the garment. The whole thing felt like a couch cushion, and I hated it. I had spent so much money on the jewels that I refused to put them on. I called Paul and my friend Briana Burnette in Sacramento, telling them it’s the end of the line for this outfit.
“Seriously— You’re giving up? After all that?” They both said to me. Sigh. Okay, guess I’ll try again, but in order for it to work, I wanted the neckline silhouette raised 2 extra inches and squared off, I said. Paul helped me with that and yelled at me a few times for taking liberties when I had sewn his initial pattern. So on reconstruction, I made it his way: No interfacing, a super strong canvas lining, and no extra room applied with seam allowances. Everything got ample boning, and I took extra care to make sure all pattern pieces properly aligned. The final product still looked a little lumpy to me, but I thought also that was because vinyl probably wasn’t made to conform to the body perfectly. I decided adding jewels made sense at this point.
People kept asking if I would sew them on. Ha ha— no. I had done that with just maybe 50 jewels for a mask and wanted to end my life.
Instead I used the same contact cement as on my disco helmet. I dabbed and dabbed glue on the corset with a sponge brush and started adding. It took maybe 20 minutes before it became very clear I didn’t have enough jewels. I had to order more from Amazon and also pick up a few extra packets from Kate Tova.
The gluing only took maybe a day, and the final version weighed at least five pounds. I hoisted the corset over my back and closed the zipper in the front, then turned it around. Beautiful, but jewels were already falling off. I took a quick photo and reapplied some jewels, then sat it down to dry and began working on the tulle.
Sigh— Still with me? Think about how I was feeling. I’d begun buying up tulle in 2020 at Cliffs Variety, then I added in more from Fabric Outlet and Mendel’s. I told everyone it was 50 yards and really it was at least that, probably even more. I tried so many different gathering techniques. Christian Squires sent me a how-to video that involved pulling bobbin thread across a zigzag stitch. Other techniques looked like they pleated the tulle. I had a serger at home that had a special gathering foot attachment. On a sewing day with Joe Wadlington there, he watched me for hours trying to get it to gather more than just little tiny ripples. Eventually, Paul Gallo showed me a hand stitch technique that pulled a thick thread through tulle. This was the most promising, but no, I wouldn’t be hand gathering 50 yards of tulle either.
On a date in Japantown one day, I’d actually picked up a roll of twine at Daiso Japan. I began gathering all the tulle less than a week before Juanita’s party, sewing in a channel at the top of it with the twine folded inside. This became the simplest method because then I could pull the tulle in like curtains once the channel was done, and knot the twine off. The painful struggle, though, was that the dress was 8 colors. Each layer and color of tulle had to be individually cut. Sewing it was pretty easy, but cutting it was just… I’d cut a piece and it would flutter to the floor, then I’d have to flutter more of it to the floor, try and lay it out, measure it, and cut again. The whole dress is between 12 and 16 layers of tulle, multiplied by 8 colors— Do some math how much cutting and measuring and fluttering to the floor that all was.
The tulle was hard, not impossible, but still what you’d expect to layer in and sew. I used a walking foot, which walks on top of fabrics while pushing underneath them at the same time; It’s a very effective tool for sequin and leather work. Still, I had to yank the tulle through as I got to the upper layers. Then it came time to attach it to the dress, and the original plan was to have the colors match the vertical lines on the corset, to make one big vertical line of color. I hadn’t considered exactly how precise this meant the tulle would have to fit on a belt strap. I ended up attaching each color of tulle separately to a piece of canvas, all gathered and layered together. And then cutting that canvas down to the exact size of the base hem of the corset where the color came out. I shoved that cut down piece into the belt and stitched it in. Then I added two grommets so I could close the belt with a strap.
The construction was mostly done but for a couple things. The canvas at the top of the tulle was super hideous and it frayed and spilled out at the excess side seams of each color, so I spent an hour at 3am—the day of Juanita’s party—hand stitching the seams into the interior of the skirt.
I tried on the dress and really didn’t want to wear it. I had stuffed the skirt underneath the corset, creating an effect where I really felt pregnant. This thing was supposed to fit me! Later that morning I had resolved to wear the skirt and just go shirtless, or wear the denim corset with some amazing jewelry Paul said he’d loan. As I showed him the different options, it occurred to me to try wrapping the tulle skirt on top of the corset at the smallest waistline point. I did that and turned around to Paul, who was mesmerized. “I don’t know why you thought of wearing anything else,” he said. I looked down and shrugged—lol—alright, this was today’s look.
Jewels fell off all day and I collected most of them to reapply later. Everyone stopped and stared. Photographers snapped a million photos. Paul stood behind me as the party grew crowded: he said people parted ways as I walked through. Several people told me I won the party. “K you can keep the dress but I want it back tomorrow,” a drag queen said. “The judges have deliberated and the results are in— you won the party,” another man told me. In the scant words I exchanged with Juanita, I thanked her for throwing the party. She gave her usual monotone hello and then paused to look at my outfit: “THAT takes work,” she said. “Where is my photographer?”
This is part of a series called “How I Raved It” — Showing my process for making nightlife and other glitsy apparel pieces, and some nightlife adventures.
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