Miss Nina of the AMAZING Ciao Nina fascinators was in need of a dress rescue. Well…Nina had this AMAZING dress, only problem was that is was much too small. I didn’t let that stop me with Julie’s dress, and this was clearly very worthy of a revamp. As you can tell, the sleeves were much too tight, and the zipper was in no way going up:

I brainstormed a bit and came up with the idea to release a few pleats in the skirt, make the dress backless, and add a black waistband to add the extra inches to close the waist. In addition I planned to cut the back in a deep v that would feed into that black band, but make the missing fabric more intentional.  We also decided to ditch the sleeves since they were way too small. For the finishing touch, Nina wanted to tie the black into the shoulders to make it even more intentional, so we added 2 triangles to top of each shoulder.  It was going to be a lot of work, but she was on board.

Now Nina can comfortably wear this dress and look amazing! Here’s the new front of the dress:

black shoulder detail:

Deep V back feeding into the expanded black waistband. Not back eh?

And if you want to see the dress in action, here is Nina and her hubby:

Do you have a dress that is too small but you just HAVE to figure out a way to get it up and running? Email me about it at kristen@rethinktailoring.com and I can brainstorm revamp ideas.