Haute Couture Club of Chicago Fashion Show review.

... better late than never!!
Back in May of this year I had the pleasure, honor and sometimes the headache of co-chairing the 2019 Haute Couture Club of Chicago ‘Color Your World’ Fashion Show. My co-chair was Melissa, my amazing daughter.

From the beginning we divide up the work and then just touched base with each other to make sure we were both on track or to see if each other needed help. Basically, I was the creative side- coming up with the Fashion show segments, the supporting images or graphics, writing and designing the show program and figuring out the order of go with 104 garments to walk the runway!

Melissa was mostly the logistics side, finding the venue, coordinating photographer and DJ as well as taking care of soliciting and organizing the raffle prizes and table decorations.  The venue this year was the Crystal Ballroom in the Historic Knickerbocker hotel, downtown Chicago. It was so beautiful!

Luckily we had the help of 2 other club members to help with taking care of the seating assignments and sending out of tickets.
This Fashion Show hosted the clubs first High School Senior Scholarship program. We had three graduating seniors that are headed to fashion design school each show a collection of their creations and they were each given a cash scholarship prize. This was so much fun! The young designers each attended some of the club meetings and also helped with modeling of other club members garments. It was a special thing pairing a young high school senior with club members who joined in the 1960’s. Each of these young designers had a one page bio in the show program.

I am glad that I had the opportunity to work on bringing the fashion to reality this year. Will I do it again? Nope! I enjoyed it and it was a new experience but I don’t need to do it again! It was an incredible amount of work and I was so glad to have done it and to have done it with my daughter, we have pretty high standards and I think we were able to uphold them with in the limits of what we had to work with. 

To go with the theme of "Color Your World" I made a new dress for Melissa to wear to the fashion show. Here she is showing off all the colors and twirl-ability of the dress :)

In addition to being co-chair of the show, I also participated in the show. I walked the runway in three garments that I designed and created over the past club year.

Thank you to everyone who helped make the day a wonderful success!

Dior- From Paris to The World at the Dallas Museum of Art

Wendy of Couture Counsellor and I headed to Dallas for a weekend to go and see the Dior exhibit. It was well worth the time of getting on a plane and heading to Texas for the first weekend of August. It was so hot and humid but like I said, so worth it! This is the same exhibit that was held in Denver earlier this year and was a joint exhibition between the 2 museums.

The tickets are timed tickets and I purchased them the morning that they went on sale. Each month goes on sale the 15th of the prior month.  The exhibit was sold out for the weekend we were there, it is very popular!

The exhibit itself was done very thoughtfully and I really liked the use of mirrors in some areas that allowed you to have a birds eye view of garments and then some that allowed you to see 'up the skirts'! The most dramatic room of all also happened to be my least favorite, only because it gave me a sense of vertigo with all of the looking up, which in turn made me a bit nauseas. The idea was a superb one but the aisle that ran down the middle with the stadium effect on either side needed to be a bit wider to work better. Of course this is all just my opinion!! I'm sure they had space restraints to work with.

It was very interesting to see how the Dior line has changed as the creative directors/fashion designers have changed. 

This is a picture heavy post... I took almost 400 pictures! Don’t worry, they are not all in here. LOL!

I tired to include only my favorites or ones that I thought were very interesting. 

Enjoy!!

Wall of Toiles

Embroidery Samples done for Dior in the late 40's/ early 50's

Hand painted and beaded

The PINK room was my favorite!

I hope you enjoyed some of these amazing garments from the Dior line!
Lots of wonderful, interesting and inspiring garments.

Happy Sewing!