Nude Descending a Staircase - Behind the scenes

We are the contributors

“Back in October, we were invited by Sandra and Melanie to participate in this amazing project We Are The Contributors. Our assignment – should we choose to accept it! – would be to create a project based on any of three pre-selected pieces from the original 1913 Armory Show, as a celebration of its 100th anniversary.

We do love a challenge, so refusing wasn’t an option. After looking carefully at the pieces, we selected the very controversial “Nude Descending a staircase, No.2” by Marcel Duchamp (a bit of research on this piece returned images of replications with C3PO walking down sets of stairs – we were sold!).

Looking further into it, we knew we didn’t want to do a full nude as that had already been done before. Instead we wanted to go with the idea of playing with form, shape and motion, and throwing our own twist into it.”

The Dress

A few people showed surprise at the fact that this dress was made on purpose for this project. Well, do you know that feeling when you look into your wardrobe and discover you have nothing to wear? Yes…

Also, since my vision for this piece involved something I wouldn’t easily find in a shop, there was only one way to go about it: to make a dress. I mean, how hard could it be??

Having absolutely zero prior experience in dress making, Pinterest came to the rescue, and I found some designs I liked and put them together in a concept drawing. I had heard you needed a pattern to start these types of things, so I fashioned one from some old newspapers and started cutting out the dress:

nude descending a staircase: the making of the dress

After a bit of trial and error, the dress was finally put together. Then undone, and put together again!

We managed to arrange a fitting with out lovely model Ana João, and I can’t tell you the joy I felt when she first tried on the dress and it magically came to life!

The location

The location we chose for the project was a clean modern staircase, as we wanted to be able to make it a seamless (see what I did there?? dress, seamless… okay, I’ll get my coat) interaction with the dress and the location. As much as we love old staircases, they always come with their own personality attached, so we opted for something clean that would allow the model and dress to shine.
We are very proud of the final results, and certainly found a new respect for dress makers!