Researching paper dresses

A few weeks ago I was browsing Twitter during a break at work when this dress caught my eyeIt had been posted on a tumblr site by someone who worked at Berg publishers and they had republished the link. Awesome I thought, the next thing I know they were asking if anyone would be willing to create such an item and before I knew what was happening I was volunteering (c'mon it is not everyday a awesome publisher offers up this kind of opportunity.
As ever when starting a new piece of design it's important to look at what has gone before, so here they are a selection of the paper dresses that have been made before, please do let me know what you think of them in the comments. This dress was made out of children's books, I completely love it, not only has it got an amazing shape but the materials have been used in a really ingenious way and you kind retain that sense of childlike wonder/what the material was before it became a dress. Fantastic! Below is the dress before it was put together, they laid out all the book covers and then stitched them together using sparkly nylon thread. Also the bodice was made out of the bindings of the books. There are loads more photos and information on this one on the designers site here. Definitely worth a look. Kind of following on in the fairytale stakes we have this dress here which I have nicknamed the big book dress. I like the way that the pages appear to have fallen at the bottom of the dress but I think that this maybe doesn't work as well as the previous dress (it was designed by a bridal designer whose blog post about the dress can be found here. The next couple of dresses are for me more about different forms within the paper dress, the first one plays about with ideas of paper, nature, leaves and flowers whereas the next uses the texture of pleated newsprint text for its main feature. My favourite out of these experimental form dresses is this one which uses light paper to create air like waves in the main bodice of the dress. Fantastic and I love it ( I would completely wear this one out although I think it maybe looses something by not showing it's origins proudly. On the other end of the scale I found this dress (actually I think dress is probably the wrong word but its definitely intended to look like a dress). Anyway that's my round up of some dresses that have been created previously. Berg have very kindly offered me use of their fashion archive so at the moment I'm going through the materials and seeing what kind of designs appeal and will work with those materials. If all this dress chatter has made you hungry for more I found this great how to for a newspaper dress. Perfect for a fancy dress party I would have thought (unless of course it rains :-)