Flamenco dress dreaming

A few birthdays ago a dear friend gave me 6m of red cotton with 1cm white polkadots. It’s such a classic pattern I can only see it as a flamenco-inspired dress. I have another dear friend who lives in Seville, and have been looking through flamenco dress photos with her while I work out exactly what kind of dress I will make.

I am posting some pictures here, so I can assess each dress for what I like and don’t like to help me refine my ideas. Well, that’s my excuse anyway.

I’m informed by my friend that flamenco fashions change through the years (makes sense really!) and that this is Today’s look. For my own dress I really don’t like that extreme mermaid silhouette, the way the ruffles go remind me of toilet brushes.

This beautiful 1940s flamenco dress Vixen Vintage found in an antique store. Vintage Vixen put heaps of petticoats underneath to get the full ruffle effect.

Ok so I won’t be making a skirt like this bata de cola. I’m after a party dress, not a performance dress. But imagine wearing one like it on stage, dancing flamenco *happy sigh*.

 

Then there’s all the white wedding Flamenco dresses. Fascinating stuff.  I rather like the sleeves on this. I could see a good-quality lace ruffle on my dress perhaps.

Asymmetry!

 

I could totally see myself making a floofy dress based on yet another Tina Givens style in my red polkadots, but my friend explained that although it would be a great dress, it wouldn’t be flamenco-y, which is a more formal style.

 

I was also thinking to ditch the sleeves. But again, my friend said although there are the odd flamenco dresses with no sleeves, mostly they have them. Even if it’s a ruffle around the shoulders and over the arms to give the illusion of sleeves.

I’ve noticed a lot of dresses have a scoop or wide v neckline or subtle sweetheart one. Princess seams are also extremely common. The bones of the dresses seem to be simple and classic.

The colours are usually fairly restrained, not in a pastel sense but in that they usually only have one or two elements eg red and white, or purple and black

And even though this has a number of different patterns, the overall effect is of blue and white

 

You can however, find pictures of deliciously colourful dresses

And then there are the shawls! I love the shawls. I’m considering adding one as a kind of collar to my dress, like this – in fact I’m seriously considering making mine pretty much a red version of this dress, I love the style of it (well, and the colour too!) so much.

I like this one on the left. It isn’t too toilet-brushy, I like the shape of that skirt.

 

Well, no great conclusions but lots of ideas and eye candy.