It is my pleasure to introduce you to Poppy Maya, international dance star and costume designer. She’s been taking design classes with me for the past six months, and I’m pleased to unveil her first major class project, a rhinestone and assiut bedlah set. Already an accomplished designer when she arrived in the Bay Area from the UK, we’ve been working together to hone her natural eye and fill her intellectual tool box with loads of strategies and techniques for designing and making unique, high quality and beautifully sewn belly dance costumes.
The project that we’ve collaborated on is absolutely lovely and extremely versatile. The design brief I gave Poppy was to design a bra and belt set using an assiut border pattern of pyramids, rhinestones and silver egyptian fringe. The result? See for yourself! Because the color palette is black and silver, this ensemble can be paired with a wide variety of skirt colors and shapes, taking this ensemble from high glam to fusion.
Poppy will be appearing in my upcoming book, The Cloth of Egypt, demonstrating the wardrobing versatility of this rhinestone embellished assiut bedlah. In the course of one afternoon-long photography session, photographer Alisha Westerfeld caught at least nine different looks, some which are quite transformative. But rather than tell you, here’s a peek at Poppy’s costume in action, paired with a straight-cut white tiger patterned skirt. I shot this video at the Bean Scene coffee shop in Sunnyvale, California, at the February Love Raks party hosted by Paloma, owner of Lunatic Fringe. I call my video “company” Shaky Stick Productions (because I shoot on a monopod and it’s still a bumpy ride,) but I hope you enjoy watching Poppy in action!
I love this assiut dress! Images of this gown have appeared all over the web for the past decade. Usually, this dress is just tagged as assiut, or included in an unlabeled collection of fashion images. The year that this picture appeared in Vogue, I tore it out and pinned it to my inspiration wall. I grabbed two images, one from British Vogue (at left) and American Vogue (below top) I loved the excessive decadence, supreme luxury, and retro glam, including numerous allusions to bohemian styles of the first two decades of the 20th century. But who designed this dress?
