Proofs - Rossetti Tribute

These proofs are from a shoot with Cinniuint, a stunning young woman from Holland, who chose to spend a precious day of her winter vacation traveling several hours into Boston with her friend Nightshade13, to do a shoot with me. When I first saw Cinniuint, on deviantArt, I was struck by her larger than life beauty--and by how very much she reminded me of Rossetti's paintings of Lizzie Siddal, Alexa Wilding and Fanny Cornforth, with their milky complexions, striking faces, expressive hands, and fantastically flowing red hair--and when we agreed to shoot together, the notion of suggesting something of Rossetti in a shoot obsessed me. After much brooding over what, exactly, made up a "Rossetti" costume, I decided to focus on the sleeves, a la "Monna Vanna"--massive, boufy sleeves to blend with the whole "larger than life" feeling of his models. And then a simple robe-like dress--since so many of his images seem to have woman wearing a light-weight robe over their 1800's street dresses. But how to achieve this?! I'd seen Maura http://www.suspiciouscloset.com create incredible gowns from simply draping fabric and pinning it in place, before--but was uncertain if I could actually do it myself. Nonetheless, I determined to try--and purchased a large remnant of an interesting looking upholstery weight fabric with a brown satiny finish on one side, and a pink and red chenille finish on the other, along with some heavy weight tulle and interfacing, with a vague idea of creating "bouf" in the sleeves by gathering the tulle and pinning it underneath, to a corset. I did come up with something creditable on my mannequin, Catherine, but was still a bit nervous about the end results, and spent a couple of hours looking at a Simplicity pattern with large sleeves, wondering if I should just try cutting the sleeves out--but chickened out, in the end. And lo and behold--it turned out that when Cinniuint showed up, with her friend, Nightshade13 in tow, Nightshade knew how to drape!!! (And the angels came down from heaven and sang--or pretty darn close to it, in my opinion! :)) So I told her what I was trying to do, and sort of loosely pinched fabric together here and there, to show what I thought would look good--and she provided the oh-so-vital know-how to make it work--and together, we built a costume that had us both patting ourselves on our backs, the rest of the afternoon, over its total awesomeness. (And thank heavens she was here, too--as that fabric was just TOO heavy for one person to easily manage. I'm SURE I wouldn't have been able to do anything NEARLY as nice by myself--if for no other reason than that it would've been too hard to hold the fabric and pin it at the same time.) After that--all I had to do was build a set that overflowed with flowers (they should've been symbolic of the message of each image--but it's winter here in Boston, and symbolic flowers were in short supply), and then all Cinniuint had to do was look like a tortured soul--et voila! A shoot that left me feeling as warm and satisfied as a Thanksgiving dinner. :D You can view more of Cinniuint's work at http://cinniunint.deviantart.com and more of Nightshade13's work at http://nightshade13.deviantart.com These images are proofs only - batch processed and lightly retouched for web viewing, and are not meant to reflect a finished product in any way. Click on the thumbnails below to view the individual galleries and/or larger images.

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