How To Take an Old 80's Prom Dress and Make it 2008!

This time Threadbanger has taken the prom dress challenge. We found an old puffy prom dress from the 1980's, and made it into a cute and fun prom dress for this decade. Its a fun and simple tutorial that explains everything, but leaves enough room for your own creativity. If you want to see more of threadbanger, subscribe to us on itunes!

Materials:

Vintage 80's dress that is desperate for a makeover
sewing machine
scissors
pins
additional embellishments of your choice

Step 1 Deconstruction

1. First, Its very important to study your garment. Sketch out a drawing to plan out exactly what you want to do. We decided to take this extremely puffy 80's prom dress and change it up into a cute and sexy, short black dress for this decade.


2. Start the deconstruction of your dress.


3. Begin by cutting off the puffy sleeves, and we decided to set them aside for later.


4. Then cut off the skirt. If you have ruffles on the bottom, as we did, separate the ruffles from the main skirt to get a large piece of flat fabric.


6. Cut out the old boning and save to use later.

Comments

[tking-3]

Love it!! Can't wait to try a re-do for my daughter, she will be thrilled to have a 1 of a kind look just for her. Thank you!!

[daydreamr]

I actually like the original dress better

[boudewijnchill]

lol me too

[bookfreak53]

I admire your clever fingers and creativity. I'm too old and too pudgy to try your idea, but I wanted to compliment you. So...when you have your own business someday you might want to run a spell check or borrow an old English major. Some people lose sight of the creativity if you have misspelled words. seem is really seam. Tool is really tulle and finally is finale. I do not mean to be picky, I just want you to know that spelling matters when you want to be taken seriously. I wish I could sew. I took it in high school, but it "didn't seem to take"! ;)

[mysss]

I can't help it. That exclamation point belongs inside the quotation marks. : )

[greendragonfly]

So, the process is laid out nicely. Where's the pic of the final product?

[SwitchGirl]

Great post... but agreed, I'd like to see a full shot of the final piece. The video goes way too fast to see what your getting and there are no photos. Please post.

[SSJanell]

its a lovely dress

[theemilyforce]

I honestly wished you would have kept the top and took off the arm ruffles and then just shortened the bottom of the skirt. But thats just me. I love the 80's.

[halfpint_4]

Does anyone know the brand of this dress? I am actually planning on wearing this dress but blue instead of black for prom this year. And when i found this website and saw the same dress i was surprised.

[Stephy_The_Great]

I was wondering the same thing. Wheres a picture of the full dress? I was also a little dissapointed that none of that white material got used, but to each their own!

[Sunny124613]

Wow I think that the dress is sooo cute!

[shop dweller]

Cute.

[freakaziod 101]

luv ur ideas

[canida]

Looks awesome! Loved the interviews, too. ;) We'll see you guys at the NNN party at SXSW, right? I agree with fizil - a nice full-length picture of the finished product would be nice to see.

[fizil]

I'm not getting much from the final shots :(

[GorillazMiko]

McDonalds! :D

_{Nice job on the Instructable by the way!}