Janelle: A Dress for The Emmys

Janelle has been coming to us for small dress alterations for a few years and has become a recognized customer, but she broke from her normally relaxed tone in the heavily exclamation mark-laden text message we received from her late one evening last September. In the text, she told us that she was attending the Emmys in Los Angeles in under a week, and she had just realized her go-to dress for this sort of event had fallen into disrepair since last time she used it. She needed us to make a few crucial alterations, and she needed them fast. She was in the shop the next morning. 

In Janelle’s case, we needed to split alterations into two parts:

  1. Reinforcing the lining of the dress, which had almost thinned all the way through because of improper storage
  2. Modernizing the features of the dress a little. Not that it’s a retro dress, but Janelle had bought it circa 2010 and the fashion world moves fast.

The first thing we did was take Janelle’s measurements to make sure all of our additions would fit her perfectly. After that, one of our master tailors retired to the back and began to draw up plans for the alterations.

To deal with issue #1, we followed these steps: 

  • Identified the weakest parts of the silk dress. Namely, there were a few very small holes in the material and several large sections that had nearly worn through. 
  • We applied a silk organza as a stabilizing layer to reinforce the delicate fabric. 
  • We used a matching piece of silk to create an invisible patch on the underside of problem areas, aligning the grain carefully to ensure the patches were not noticeable. 
  • Using a silk thread that matched the color of the dress, our head tailor Hong applied an advanced reweaving technique that adds a bit of decorative flair and unifies the look of the entire dress, making the alterations invisible.

To address issue #2, our tailors called upon their fashionista knowledge to apply several of the most modern trends in formal women’s fashion to the dress. For example:

  • The biggest change we made was cutting and sewing to apply a swoop shoulder to the dress, an element that is very in-style the past few years because it adds an interesting element to the dress without requiring embellishment.
  • Whereas flashy and garish sequins were in vogue for a time during the 2010s, a subtler approach is favored nowadays. We sewed a layer of chiffon fabric over the dress’s sequins to dull them significantly, but we made the layer detachable so Janelle could still unleash the full sparkle of the sequins if she wanted to wear the dress during one of her performances as a backup singer.
  • We added a bit of fabric to the dress to give it a looser silhouette, another fashion element that’s popular nowadays. 

When we showed the finished alterations to Janelle after four business days, she was overjoyed. We also identified that the root of the wearing-through had been moths, so we threw in a breathable hanger bag with most deterrent sachets for future storage. 

For years, we’ve been helping people like Janelle to perform rush alteration on dresses in one week or less. If you need a garment altered fast, check out ATL Tailor’s rush alteration services.