Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

I love watching the Met Gala! It is so much fun to see what people wear-from the fabulously fashionable to the fantastically fabulous. I watch every year and come away inspired and amused and happy. This year was no different. I loved the various interpretations on the dress code of the “Garden of Time”, which I looked up and read with an eye toward fashion. 

The story is grim and does have references to actual clothing worn by the various characters. There are the dirty hordes with their rags and tattered uniforms and the villa dwellers with their flowing, soft garments in lush colors and fabrics. Those are the easy inspirations. You could just recreate these looks and move on, topic addressed and finished. To address the hordes, you could base your design on their dirty rags of clothing using high end fabrics with individually sewn on beads in the colors of decay. You could make Armageddon sleek and sexy and very, very expensive. Or you could do gorgeous, silky robes and play off of the people hiding in time in the garden. It’s easy and straightforward and would be beautiful. It would also create a really dark commentary on the people who attend the Met Gala and the horrors of the world we all live in.

The most fun, of course, comes in addressing some other aspect of the story, which is what most designers do because they aren’t hacks looking for an easy way out. The Met Gala isn’t the 11th hour senior year project that doesn’t really matter and is just to keep a bunch of 18 year olds from realizing they are adults and don’t need this stupid busy work anymore. Nope. This is a “risk it all and show them how awesome you can be while the world watches” type of moment. So many designers go all out and that’s why I watch every year. It’s a masterclass on fashion awesomeness. Even if it does mean hiding in the time garden for an evening and trying to forget all the evils the world is glutting on right now.

Despite my avid watching, I will never be invited to design for the Met Gala. That, however, does not mean I cannot sit in my comfy chair, with my cat apprentice, and dream up what dress I would have made for this year’s Gala. Let me show you what I came up with. Please understand that I cannot draw. I have drawn a little picture. It is bad and not very representational of my plan. It is a nudge for me to remember what was in my head. The image there is quite vivid and fully formed. 

The basics of the dress 

The dress would be made of a crocheted mesh, of some happy and shapeable sort, executed in a soft gray yarn with a matte finish. I’m thinking of non-mercerized cotton or wool. The neck opening would be wide, nearly to the shoulders, fitted through the waist, and very full through the skirt. The back of the skirt would be fuller than the front, which would be just above floor length, while the back extends into a train. The sleeves would be three quarter sleeves with a slight flare past the elbow. I would experiment with dangling some flowers off the ends of the sleeves. I would run several rows of single crochet, maybe with a picot every few stitches on the last row, around the edges of all of the hems for a finished look. There would, without question, be fancy little buttons up the back. 

The flowers that address the theme

To pull in the theme, I would cover the dress in flowers from top to bottom. They would be artfully and tastefully placed to help with modesty and aesthetics. The flowers would move from small buds in pale colors (white to light pink) at the shoulders, to small flowers with slightly more color around the upper body, to larger and larger flowers with more detail and richer colors until we reach the deepest reddish pink shade for the largest flowers around the waist. Those flowers would then begin to shrink and darken into rust and brown tones. Petals would be eliminated and details lost as the flowers moved down the dress and closer to the ground. The flowers at the bottom would not only be done in brown tones to show their decay, but they would also be held on with just a single strand so that flowers would fall off as the evening went on, spreading signs of decay wherever the wearer went. All of the flowers would be made of silk or a silk blend yarn so they would shimmer even as they “died”.

I would work the whole thing in lace weight yarns because it would drape like mad and it would be so gratifying to hear the commentators announce that it took some ridiculous number of hours to make it up. Then I could sit back and nurse my poor, tired fingers and bask in the two seconds of fame my hard work brought me as E News moved on to the next fantasy gown, falling right back out of the beautiful world of the time garden into the harsh reality of our world.