Though I have a costuming background, I am not a fan of faked closures. In fact, I am opposed. I really hate seeing modern day wedding dresses that have a zipper up the back with 40 buttons sewn on it. It’s fake. This is your wedding day! No faking!
So if I make a dress with 40 buttons up the back, you can bet that they are the actual functional closures of the dress. Closures like zippers and snaps aren’t pretty. If I ever use them, they are totally covered and hidden.
Real closures for real women.
Up to this last fitting, I have had the secret jacket closures as snaps, so that I could move them if I needed to for fit. Now that I have accurately marked the final placement of the jacket closures, I am replacing the snaps with tailored buttonholes. I don’t mean to give off the impression that snaps are bad. There is a couture way of covering snaps with fabric that make them quite lovely. But since this is the main closure for the jacket, (even though they are completely hidden by the belt) I decided to change them to tailored buttonholes and real buttons.
Leah also has another hidden closure. Her dress has a low V-back with 9 (real) buttons to close it to the waist. Some buttons are covered by the belt (and soon by the bouquet), but the skirt has a completely hidden zipper. I devised a way for it to be tucked away in the back pleats and remain totally out of sight: The middle pleat is held up by two hooks and thread bars (hidden by the belt) covering the closure completely. Below, you can see it in place and hidden (left), and then unhooked with the panel dropped (right).
Engineering the perfect closures is something I put a lot of thought into. It’s an opportunity to be really clever and secretive. To me, closures must be beautiful or unseen. Or both!!
