the bias cut - a real dress

As I told you before, I also finished the bias cut dress last week and we took pictures of it last weekend.
To be honest, it took much longer to get good-enough pictures of this dress than of the 1929 dress. This dress may also be really comfortable, the bright colour tends to make me feel conspicuous and I keep getting worried about looking like a rectangle. And I had some issues (largely solved before hemming) with tension in the serger thread which made the seams ripple.

Anyway, here is my bias cut dress. I made the bodice like I did for the test version, just with all the modifications (mostly tiny adjustments of the height of the underbust seam, the neckline and the darts) I had decided on, based on that. This bodice is self-lined and I applied very lightweight fusible interfacing (the slightly stretchy kind) to that lining and extra edge stabilizer to the neckline. It makes for a much more stable construction, so stable indeed that it will stay on my shoulders rather well.

This new skirt is a bias cut, fairly narrow A-line. In the test version, I kept taking in seams to get that figure hugging effect we are told to expect from bias cut material, only to have it stretch out again. Here, I cut wider and let the drape do the work. Which worked a lot better. Even though, as I mentioned above, I need to get used to this look (I like how it looks from the back though). But the length and the colour may have something to do with that as well. Or the fact that I haven't seen bias cut dresses in the street since the late 1990's... Although that doesn't normally stop me from wearing something...

Whatever my eventual style verdict might be, the dress is very comfortable and because it is made from that same crepe fabric, very nice in warm weather. I should definitely try more with bias cut elements but I don't quite know where to go from here. A slip would be very obvious and wouldn't mean moving along design-wise. There's also a single bias cut evening dress in my size in the Gracieuses from the 1930's but I kind of promised, in my Vintage Pattern Pledge to try and spread my projects across different media as well...
At least I got a big picture-book about the work of Madeleine Vionnet from the library. That should provide some inspiration (and of course, there are so many other projects I could turn my attention to as well...)