Star Trek Style: DIY Zipper Trim Dress

66Sick dress, YSL platforms, Iosselliani ring

With all the nonstop talk we've been doing lately about DIY's, it's somewhat ironic that we ourselves have been slacking so much in that area. I blame it on being out of town for two weeks, a constantly self-replenishing pile of work, and then just plain summer laziness (let's be real, I'd rather be at the beach). Still, when we were contacted to be interviewed by Brazilian Television this week, we knew we had to make something new to wear. We took a project that Christina had started months ago, but somehow has been sitting dormant under her sewing machine collecting dust. Christina made these dresses out of a dusty rose mesh fabric, and then we went to work embellishing it with zipper trimmed bra cups and Judy Jetson style shoulder pads, for a look that might have been inspired from watching too many Lady Gaga videos.

Although we probably totally messed up our interview, I'm pretty satisfied with the way our outfits came out, and hopefully Christina and I look half decent while we're giggling between incomprehensible murmurings about our music tastes, outfit inspiration etc (I hope they edit the footage, like, a lot). Here's a basic rundown of how we created the outfit. Even though we made the dress, the same technique could be applied to any simple dress you have lying around.

1. We've been inspired a lot by the ubiquitous use of zipper-trim details across the blogs and the catwalks alike. Outi has perfected many zipper garments, and we thought we would give it a try as a trim. We simply pinned the zippers to the border of these bra cups, making sure to cut small slits in the zipper tape to ensure that it could bend properly to fit the shape of the curve. We then ran the cups through the sewing machine, using contrasting black top-stitching.

2. To make the zipper trimmed shoulder pads, we made a small nude pillow-case style cover for each shoulder pad, pinning the case inside-out, with the zipper edge facing the inside. We then sewed it up almost entirely, before turning the case inside out, and slipping the shoulder pad in. We then finished by slip-stitching the remaining opening shut.

3. After the bra cups and shoulder pads were finished, we pinned them to the dress and hand-tacked them on.

EDIT: Here's a picture that Nicky took of us in our outfits!

>-Tiffany