The Sonia Rykiel dress

I found this vintage Sonia Rykiel dress in a flee market for only 40 €. it was part of an inheritance of a really elegant parisian woman. This is the thing I love when I buy a piece of clothes in a flee market, it's more about transmission than a mere transaction, the clothes has already an history, it's not only a piece of fabric but when you acquire it, it bring with it all its memories and former experiences. I know some people hate this feeling "can you imagine, it belonged to a dead person" but for me it make the piece of clothes even more valuable! 

When I show my acquisition to my Mum she was "what is is useless thing you bought again? when are you going to wear it, you can't even wear it for a weeding this is a red carpet dress". 

-But Mum, I'm doing theatre, i'm going to wear it". 

I was right. Because this dress is so special and unique every timetime I asked people i'm doing a project with "what should are where?" I can see their eyes light up and whisper "could you wear THE pink dress?" So the dress is not religiously tidied in my closet in a special protective cover but rolled into a ball in my uni locker ready to be worn for a performance or a shooting! 

Eventually she suit every project, quite timeless, worn long or short, with or without a coat. 

I see this dress as a mix between the Great Gatsby roaring twenties for the shape, French cancan-Belle époque for the feathers  which come tickles your ears, and the 1930's Hollywood golden age for the length and the bare back.  

Moreover, this dress symbolise for me the Sonia Rykiel style with the baby pink as her trademark and her gorgeous muslin ruffled dresses in vintage floral.  For me, Sonia Rykiel epitomises the released sophistication and the French elegance par excellence. Her boudoir style creations are mixing fantasy and femininity with a touch of provocation. She dresses the parisian woman, mischievous and fresh, smart and romantic,  joyful and aerial, at the same time really feminine and pepsi. 

I use this dress in two Simon's projects, my partner in crime. 

 In "the Jamais je ne vivrai sans toi" video  the use of colour was particularly important resorting to a "saturated colour palette that is used to express stylised emotion". 

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http://simondodi.com

Simon resorted to video editing effect, which make the feather dress explode and fade in thousands of glitter. Basically are both dressed the same colours (blue pink and yellow)  and went we cross each other we exchange colours.

We shot every bits separately with every outfits then Simon put them together and added theses amazing glitters fading effects! 

The pink dress look nice as always but it's maybe not the best choice for editing in  after effect, and gave a lot of work to Simon because it's quite vapourous and flowing so it's really hard to get a clean but he did really well! 

For the experiment_02,  I wear the Sonia Rykiel dress to remind the pink of Catherine Deneuve in "Les Demoiselles de Rochefort", I like the discrepancy between Jacques Demy universes really happy and colourful, our performance of jaded and bored  people who are just waiting and make feel like in a Hooper painting. 

http://simondodi.com

Simon explains: "I had two performers dressed in pink and yellow to match the colours of the young girls and projected this video in two ways, one across the corner of the space with the performers projected upon and another with the performers in front of the projection screen. I have then edited these three clips together with the original video synced and a fluid transition from each take to the next. What I feel I have achieved is a piece that questions the “live-ness” of the work, as we know it is a recorded performance. With all the clips layered onto each other it creates an effect that this was taken in one shot and not two, but we know that the performers cannot directly walk through each other.

Me:"What do you have to do?"
Simon: "you just have to wait. "

http://simondodi.com

I played also in this short film for Marinika Sadgyan. The idea was to create a short sketch in film noir, resorting to the shame code of the genre. 

The main inspiration for the female performer was Lauren Bacall. I found in the costume department a  black dress which was really 40s, but I kept the Sonia Rykiel one as a second option. 

When we discuss about the dress with Marinka we were "the black dress is more appropriate but it is a bit dull, the feather dress is less time-specified but it look nicer on the screen. So sometimes you have to give priority to the aesthetic rather than the accuracy to give a better effect. I feel this pink dress is also really nice in black and white and her "time less" look can fit it in every type of aesthetic. 

 I also  did this narrative photography project "The Encounter" with Cheuk See who was an MA Communication Design. 

"My project is about visually narrating a subconscious encounter between two people who always exist within the same photographic frame but have never had any form of contact with or notice the existence of each other. It's a project playing around the themes of existence and absence, conscious and subconscious." 

The outfit of the female performer was determined by a book picked randomly at the library by Cheuk entitled "Hidden feminity". So I suggested the Sonia Rykiel for the pink lace and the transparency. I wore a  trench coat over it to give a masculine attitude to the dress and play with the ambiguity of the "hidden feminity". Tell me  I chose to wear the the dress short rolled up with a belt because it was more easy to cycle like that and make it less "party dress"

I'm also performing for Cristina in the "Foyer Project" where i'm playing someone who doesn't make the difference between fiction and reality (quite close to my real self actually) and where each costume stand for a different identity which coexist in every human being. 

We decided together that the feather dress will be the "feminine" and "sophisticated" identity. It's interesting to see how we define our identity by what we are wearing, and here it's the other way round, we go from a costume and find the identity which match with it, expressing different pars  of the self through outfit. 

In "Nina's mad", we were four performers dancing, wearing overalls which make us quite antonymous figures. But for the last scene we have to put off the overalls and "reveal our true self". 

So Danielle asked us to choose something which characterised us the best, that we like wearing, in which we feel fabulous. Obviously I choose  this dress  which epitomises the best the way I would like people see me.