86,400 Crystals, 579 Yards of Chain, and Hours of Hand Stitching: Area Takes Apart Its Show-Stopping Bustier

[fabric ripping]

[light classical music]

Hi, we're Area.

My name is Beckett Fogg.

And I'm Piotrek Panszczyk,

and today we're deconstructing

our Crystal Cup Chain Halter Dress.

[Beckett] We used 579 yards of cup chain on this dress,

86,400 crystals.

[light dance music]

We obviously had to create a perfect paper pattern.

You have to draw out every single crystal in the pattern.

We really wanted to create something

that would feel sculptural but also be fluid.

We actually started looking at Madame Gres' dresses

from the 40s, 50s.

They basically looked like sculptures, these dresses.

They were braided fabric and they were beautiful.

So we kind of started looking at that and thinking,

How can we reinvent it in Area's way?

If you start on top,

the first thing that you see is the cup chain.

Once you take that off, expose the padded pattern piece

that we call the dumpling,

two layers of cotton with a layer of tulle in between

and batting sets.

Scary?

Yes, yes.

It's our baby basically.

It's like operating on your baby.

It took a very long time to achieve.

First we're gonna basically start

with the lining that you see that hides all the interior.

We're gonna carefully take that off,

and there's a hand stitch along the line everywhere

around the bodice, and that's gonna be the first step

to open the silk lining up.

Yeah, so now, when the lining is open,

you start seeing the whole interior structure.

So you see all the mark and stitches,

you see the tulle that is folded, the padding underneath.

The seam that I'm unpicking now,

that's actually one of the few seams

that is a machine stitch, and we do it as a machine stitch

because this zipper has a lot of friction

from going up and down, and as it's such a stiff piece,

we need to make sure that it doesn't pop.

All these edges that you see here,

you could never get this close with a machine basically,

so we really have to catch it by hand

and carefully close it.

There we go.

The inside of the dress.

[Hsun-Hsien] Here is the inside.

[Piotrek] As you see, it's a couple of layers.

From the outside, it looks really clean,

but from the inside,

you kinda see that it has a lot of function to it.

For instance, all these pieces are block fused

and stabilized with fusible to have less movement

while you're making the lining,

and then you also see here the boning,

and the boning really gives it

an extra structure on the inside.

It's horse hair and nylon, I think.

You can find this in corsetry.

If we flip the lining back,

you'll also see this grosgrain ribbon,

which again, with the boning, really cinches your waist

because obviously this piece is quite hard

to refit once it's fitted.

We have hook and eye on the inside

so that you can at least adjust it to someone's waist.

Now we're gonna take the braided bodice,

we're gonna separate these pieces from each other now.

Even if you look at the whole top,

that bodice is 21 individual small pieces

that create this kinda illusion of a braided dress.

Once you start opening the actual individual pieces

from each other, you see kind of how they start separating

into almost darts.

That is quite important in these patterns,

that they have all these darts where it gets connected

so it gets this nice roundness

around the bust and the waist.

This is sometimes challenging with sewing by hand

because it has to meet so closely.

So this is how all the pieces are gonna start looking.

So yeah, so this is the whole braided cup.

Tulle is an interesting material

because it seems quite dainty and transparent.

There's a lot of different tulles used in embroidery.

There's a lot of power meshes,

tulles that are almost invisible to see.

We tried organza also, but that was too light.

We tried silk, synthetic.

We tried a lot of things, and in the end,

we decided to go for this actual nylon tulle,

which was super transparent but strong,

and dyeable in our colors.

Yeah, so here you see all the stay stitching

that all holds all the padding together.

This is gonna take a while because all the cup chains,

there's a bunch of different sizes,

so we go from small to medium to large.

Wherever we have to unpick the small one,

it's gonna take a while

because their stitches are super tiny.

We have to know exactly where the cup chain's coming from.

Even though, if it's the same size crystal,

there's slight variations there,

so it's always important that we know exactly

which material we're working with

and we can't just say, Oh, we want cup chain in this size.

No, it doesn't work like that.

You really have to know exactly where it's coming from

so that you know the dimensions.

[Piotrek] If you look closely also,

you see how dense the crystal is folded into each other.

The chain actually comes with spacing, so once we embroider,

we really push in all the stones together

so that they are very close to each other.

Here, you already start seeing peeks of the padding.

So this is the largest crystal that we use.

[Hsun-Hsien] When it's all stitched dense like this,

we'll have to steam it to soften the stitching

and then we can shape it better.

[Piotrek] There we go.

[Hsun-Hsien] There we go.

[Piotrek] We refer to this as a dumpling.

We're basically looking at the pieces with the padding,

without the crystal on top of it

and all this fluff that you're seeing here,

that's all leftover stitching from the embroidery basically.

What was even kind of more important was the inside,

so the actual filling.

That was kind of a lot of trial and error

because you have a lot of different options.

At first, we did it with felt,

which was almost too heavy but still soft,

and we wanted something that was a bit more malleable,

but still you could pack it quite tight.

We're gonna be unpicking this whole top cotton part

and open it up and start taking out the cording.

We talked about these stitches, right?

How it kind of holds all the padding together?

You don't even really see the stitching per se,

but like this, you're starting to really see

what the stitching is for.

[Hsun-Hsien] We use cotton cord to do the filling,

just because we have more control,

'cause every individual piece have a different height.

[Piotrek] You look at every piece,

you could really see that it has a gradient,

so it goes up and down like a hill basically.

There we go.

Already, once you start cutting these main threads open,

it starts already getting way looser,

and if you zoom in closely,

you really see little little gray dots

going through the threading.

You barely can see it, but it all pierces the whole padding.

It's not even that easy to just rip it all out.

It's really secure.

If you don't make it dense enough,

you'll never get the shape,

because it's basically metal that you're embroidering

on a hill, and if the hill is not solid,

it will just collapse on top of itself.

So now we're left with the final piece.

This is the padding that goes into this one tiny piece.

There's a percentage of error involved

when you're working with cup chain

because it opens, it closes.

You can't ever predict exactly what the length

is going to be when you sew it onto something.

For that reason, a lot of it has to be done manually.

We work with this material so often

that we don't just throw away the scraps

or the wasted materials from pieces that don't work.

We're always able to reuse them,

and so all of our sampling processes,

it comes from pieces that came before that didn't work out.

We're never wasting the material,

it's too precious for that.

[Piotrek] Through the years, we really started

working with it in a lot of different ways.

Building, soldering, embroidering as you can see here.

It's basically a rhinestone that is inside of a cup

and the cup is connected by T bars.

We're gonna open up the chain

and show you how it is constructed.

So this is the cup that you fold closed,

and this is the pointed back stone that is inside.

These stones are actually connected by machine.

[Hsun-Hsien] I'm using this really sharp embroidery snip

to go in to open it, 'cause many pliers on the markets

won't be able to.

[Piotrek] 'Cause they're so tiny, we'll show you.

[Hsun-Hsien] They're so tiny.

[Piotrek] So here in my hand, this is the bar

of the large crystal, this is the medium one,

and then here you see how tiny the small one is.

I think it all comes back to the light refraction

and high quality crystal.

Especially at our runway shows,

we really like to play with the lighting

to enhance that in different ways.

Sometimes you would think that,

Oh, you need the brightest room possible,

but that's not actually true.

Sometimes when it's almost completely dark,

that's when the crystals just let off a huge spectrum,

almost like a rainbow of light.

I think for us, it's also interesting

that you can change the environment

and that, in turn, changes the garment.

You can kinda see how something that can feel and look

hard and massive is actually constructed out of a lot

of loose thread and materials

that are more fluid and chain-like,

but the way we kind of mold them and built them up,

it becomes more something that is solid.

We love the processes that we become involved in.

We almost become obsessed by the handcraft, the labor.

The actual process itself becomes so immersing for us

that we end up doing couture pieces

without really necessarily meaning to essentially.

I feel like a lot of times, when people look at a garment,

they don't necessarily understand immediately

all of the work that goes behind that garment,

and I think, with these pieces, it's almost impossible

not to recognize that.

You have to acknowledge the handcraft and the expertise

that goes into creating something

that is so unique and different.

There's no way that a machine

can spit something like that out.

There is labor involved in all clothing that's made,

and it's something that people complain about prices,

Oh, I can't believe that's $20.

I can't believe that's only $20

when somebody actually sewed that by hand.

Yes, this is a couture garment,

it's not a T shirt, but I think it's speaking to a very,

a problem that I think we have with the industry

and people's perceptions of it.

I love how it looks on the inside always.

If you really get into the structure

and start understanding how a garment like that is built,

that it doesn't just stand up by itself,

you really need to go through

a lot of very rigorous steps to achieve it.

I don't know, I thought it would be more sad,

but it was actually quite therapeutic.