Paper Dresses

Popular in the 1960s, paper dresses, perhaps spurred to fame by Andy Warhol's classic soup dress were very basic, stocky things. Only recently have designers returned to this trend. While many paper dresses are one-time-only wearable items or impossible to wear, they provide stunning examples of visual art combining fashion, origami, and paper-making techniques. The examples below are some of the ideas modern designers and artists have come up with on how to re-interpret paper as a material that confronts themes of stability and fragility, structure and process, the permanent and the ephemeral.