Dahlia Dresses 2020

On the second afternoon of Triple Wren’s Dahlia Camp this year, our Camp guests teamed up with crew members to create two contrasting formal “dahlia gowns.” Our Triple Wren Crew was over the moon to have an opportunity in 2020 to create more of these beautiful dresses, and we did a lot of preparation before camp to make the Camp session flow smoothly.

First, I taught our Camp attendees the basics of how to design a flower dress first on paper, explained how to help a model choose a gown for the project, discussed/demonstrated editing the dresses to make them work smoothly, and then we worked together to affix dahlias that had been picked in two distinct palettes and conditioned in our cooler for about 24 hours to each dress. (If you want to learn more about our process for these dresses, listen to my spring 2020 interview on the Slow Flowers Podcast!)

We spent an hour before dinner discussing self-care, work-life balance, and opening our hearts about the biggest struggles we face as women in the business of flowers, and while we talked I made these beautiful crowns to go with each dress from ingredients @Carolinearnhart__ picked. I felt like that hour encapsulated the beauty of our 2020 Camp: a lovely juxtaposition of group collaboration, personal sharing, and creating delicate floral art from the bounty of our farm

Symmetrie Salon artists @mercedezbeauty@maliashairdesign, and @stylingwithkaitlyn designed hair and makeup for models @avalasomma and @shelley.honey to complement the dresses our teams created, and Kiana Lindsey Photography captured the models’ final fittings and then spent golden hour at the farm photographing the dresses. It truly takes a village to pull off designing, creating, and photographing beautiful art like these dresses, and I feel sure that it’s an experience no one who participated will ever forget!