24,000 LEDs

Really, 24,000 LEDs to make a dress.

Ballkleid

What we'll be wearing in the year 2000!

Aww...

In honour of St Valentine's Day, and via the ever-fascinating English Russia, we bring you Russian brides!



The same site has some nice Soviet fashion pics.

'Where fashion meets fanwriting,' indeed

There's recently been a ferocious, fannish debate (not the first, evidently) about Krull. For me, one of the highlights of the movie was Lysette Anthony. When I first saw it I was convinced I'd seen her before, and after a while I remembered: she was photographed by David Bailey for the cover of a copy of Brides that my wife got before our wedding.

Aptly enough, the costume Lysette Anthony wore in the movie became an actual Alfred Angelo dress:

Best dressed at the Hugos

Cheryl awards the best frock.

Another classic

The latest extravagance in the local charity shop is an 80s classic. I can't imagine anyone buying it for anything but a costume party.

Fairy tales

Disney has launched a range of wedding dresses inspired by, guess what, Disney movies and designed by Kirstie Kelly. Responses have varied from breathless enthusiasm to sniffs and raised eyebrows.

Perhaps regrettably, none of the designs (not even those inspired by Enchanted) look anything like this:

ICFA Photos

Emerald City may have ceased publication, but the Emerald City Best Dressed Award still gets given out at various conventions I attend. You can see the results for this year's ICFA here. There isn't a formal dinner or award ceremony at FinnCon, so the next contest will be the Hugo Ceremony in Denver. I am, of course, ruling myself ineligible, which is rather a shame this year because I'm very pleased with the dress I have found. Especially as it only cost me $23.

Mostly armless

Charity-shop wedding dresses come in two kinds.

Sometimes a charity shop gets recent dresses, from a bridal shop that's gone out of business or (more often) from display stock.

And then there's the old stuff. Sometimes spectacularly ugly:




Sometimes just unfashionable:

A biologist and an artist have collaborated to produce dresses from the film that forms on contaminated wine:

Cotton is plant-based cellulose after all, and this stuff is just bacterial-based cellulose, Cass explains. Before long they had rigged up their own system for cultivating the Acetobacter, using a small shallow vat they could fill with 500 ml of red wine. The resulting sheets of fermented fabric, semi-transparent with streaks of deep red, looked a lot like flayed or badly scarred skin.

From water into wine into...dresses?

The height of throwaway fashion

Dissolvable dress

Dig those shoes



United Nude Shoes
- a Kevlar Moebius strip

More space-age fashion

Hussein Chalayan's fashion show has a lot of nearly-normal-looking clothes (except for the hats), until about the 8:30 mark, when the bubble girl shows up, and then the animatronic outfits. Weird soundtrack, too.

The Sound of Fashion

Because you need to know how your haute couture sounds.

Metal shoes and space clothes

Metal armour stiletto heels from Babylon 5 by Sword & Stone

Locable metal stilletos

Space fashion

A vital accessory

For the formal slave.

Ready-to-wear

Boing Boing links to a sufficiently bizarre outfit that seems to be a rip-off of something else, but when you get there, do continue with the rest of the collection.

Something for the weekend?

Condom Wedding Dress

Shoulders

Bare shoulders. It took me until a week or two ago to notice that the defining note of current bridal and formal isn't the absence of glop but the absence of sleeves. Strapless or sleeveless is how most posh frocks look at the moment. Why? I have no idea, except to parody the evolutionary psychologists and suggest that lithe limbs are the last measure of fitness that can't be enhanced, and in the nature of the case, legs have to be covered, so ... it's another twist in the arms race.

A flick through a recent British Brides suggests, though, that the tectonic plates may be shifting. The fashion pages look very different from the cookie-cutter corset-top ads. Lots of seventies boho chic, in white, as well as more distant influences. The cover model is wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved lace jacket. Tellingly, one of the mag's own editorial staff married in a very forties-looking number, fitted at the bodice yes, but with no boning and lots of flow, a narrow-frilled hem, and gigot sleeves. Her bridesmaids wear pale pink frocks - straight skirts, wrapover bodices, little cap sleeves - that have a charity shop in their very near future.