This is “Repurposed blue denim jeans” dress by Junya watanabe. The dress is crafted by him in Spring of 2002, Japan.
This is picture of Junya Watanabe. He is a Japanese fashion designer, who was born in Fukushima, Japan in 1961. When he made this dress, he began his apprenticeship at “Comme des Garçons” as a pattern maker. He is known for designing innovative and distinctive clothing.
This dress was actually on the runway for “Comme des Garçons” Spring 2002 Paris Fashion Week collection. This was another highlight of the show that was showing the versatility of denim to create a distressed and draped couture garment.
He plays with the fabric and deconstruct them to create a new style. Using different drapes and stitching forms a different image, such as 19th century boned bodice.
The draping from the jeans are really creating the diagonal lines of the dress, which is catching the viewer’s eyes.
I could not find any of his original sketches for this dress. However, the inspiration is clearly recreating the denim from it’s original shape, but still using the aspects of it.
The whole purpose of this dress is to make a repurposed dress out of jeans , so the material is denim. Denim is not so thin that the silhouette does not get ruined: it can stay as the designer wanted to be. Also, he did not change the color of the fabric to indicate that the material is straight from the jeans without any modifying.
This collection was ready-to-wear, which is different than Haute Couture that everything is handmade, so I assume that this dress is made out of machines.
This is my prototype of the original sketch that I only tried to make the base structure of the dress without the little details.