Creative Design: Professional

Pleated Bustle

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Abstract

Perspectives for ideal beauty have undergone changes according to the times but an hourglass silhouette still maximizes the beauty of a female body. New Look in 1950s expressed an aesthetic ideal of the end of the 19th century, and also a lot of designers including Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen created beautiful dresses with a fit and flare silhouette. I made an underskirt Mujigi worn to swell an outer skirt into a dress with a view to expressing the beauty of a female body only by many pleats and layers without a body-suppressing corset or a hoop. This project aimed to realize the principle of the symmetrical balance through knife pleats from polyester organza using one of design elements, line, in particular a rigid vertical line. However, a soft feeling of a curve was also expressed along with pleats naturally fallen to the front following a bodily curve. Besides, such a curve also took a bisymmetrical shape. In addition, unity, one of design principles was realized using less saturated red for the entire tone. After folding knife pleats from 44 inch wide polyester organza at an interval of 1 5/8inch, inverted pleats were made by connecting two pleats to the center with Frenchseam. At the front, inverted pleats set was overlapped fourfold and connected to an inverted shape of the Mujigi skirt, giving the breasts more volumes. The back is composed of two layers. The first layer ensures a form of the back through connecting inverted pleats made from two knife pleats to the front and the outermost layer was made to fall backward to give hips a full volume like a bustle. A shoulder strap was attached to support several layers and a sash was tied to the inside layer of the back in order to fix from the inside. An edge facing up was wrapped with a ribbon in order not to come loose.

How to Cite:

Choi, S., (2017) “Pleated Bustle”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 74(1).