Catwalk model: Poppy
Hair & makeup: Sammm Agnew and team using Face Lace
Jewellery: Prong
Outfit: Violet Divine set
Oh, Divine, how we love you! All of the powermesh - tricky, stretchy, but helpful for fit - lives at the back of the set. At the front, it's nothing but subtle black stitching and clean satin, perfect for embellishing.
Truly, there were a hundred different things we could have done with this, since it was clearly crying out for some lace applique, and since what we had in our gigantic box of tricks was indeed mainly lace. But we're all cruel, so we firmly vetoed Joe's enthusiastic suggestion:
Admittedly it would have been... eye-catching. But Katie-the-pants-intern had discovered a black Guipere lace that reminded us all of a 1920s headdress:
The seam on the moulded cups turned out to be the perfect place to add this lace. We cut it down so that it just covered each cup, then sewed the straight edge of the lace just over the seam. Doing this meant that the edge of the lace didn't wobble - it followed the nice curved line on the cups. A few stitches up the sides made sure that the lace wouldn't droop.
When the bra was completed, we put the entire set - bra, briefs and girdle - onto Mildred the Mannequin, and realised that we could leave the briefs plain. On the catwalk, if they were visible enough to need customising, there would have been a rather serious wardrobe malfunction!
Because of this, we decided that the best place to add more lace was just above the inverted "V" powermesh insert on the girdle. Again, this gave us a great line to work with, and sewing into the satin meant that we didn't need to worry too much about the mesh stretching.
Why don't we normally use this sort of ornamentation? Guipere lace is pricy (look, basically, if we get a lace that's actually named, by our standards, it's expensive), and the piece-stitching - carefully stitching the contrast lines onto individual panels before making the garment - was the costly detailing on this style as it was.
Fancy trying this at home? As it happens, we have a batch of these bras that are slightly squiffy, so if you've wanted to see how your stitching, painting or crystalling skills were but didn't want to end up destroying your lovely things, well, either start on some practise fabric, or, you can start on one of these bras - we'll send out a free one with every order this week!
