A Look Back: Family Force 5

I find it truly amazing what dancing and a mosh pit will do to a dress that seems indestructible. Anyone who knows me would tell you that I have an unhealthy love to dance like a maniac and mosh. While my moshing days are coming to a close after a few too many softball size bruises and passing out, my dancing days are far from over. 2009 was the year of Family Force 5. I could not get enough and I think I attended 4 of their shows within a year. This dress is one of my later dresses where I learned the beauty of garbage bags and had constructed this dress within the 24 hours before the show.

The dress is based off of Family Force 5's song "Rip it up" which you can listen to below:





The song itself is about essentially dancing crazy and "ripping up" and "tearing up" the dance floor so I thought why not make that literal and take a dance floor (like the one below) and rip it up.

I created a bunch of brightly colored squares of duct tape and pieced them together. On the top of the dress, I cut out with a craft blade the words "Rip It Up" with the "p" mimicking the lightning bolt in the logo. After the concert, I hung around to get it signed by the band. Promptly after having it signed, I covered the signatures with clear packaging tape to preserve them. As you can tell from the picture, I was dancing so much I looked pretty rough though being front row and dancing like crazy in that small club was one of the best concert experiences of my life. Now after 4 different FF5 outfits, they remembered me as "Duct Tape Girl" when I saw them at Cedar Point/.


Rip It Up Lyrics:
I saw you strut
Into the room
My heart started pumpin'
When you broke out them moves

Your heels dug in
Straight through the floor
You're a machine, baby
Seek and destroy

[Pre Chorus 1:]
She must be crazy
She's got that feeling
Look out now she's a psycho killer

[Chorus 1:]
The dance floor is shredded to pieces
The way you rip it up has got my heart rate increasin'
The dance floor is obliterated
The way you tear it up has got my soul liberated

[Chorus 2:]
Rip it up

Rip it up
Don't stop until it's torn up
Tear it up
Tear it up
It's just the fate of the dance floor

[Verse 2:]
She cuts a rug
Just like a razor
Then burns it down
Like an incinerator

She's a slayer
And it don't phase her
She's from the future
She's a terminator

[Pre Chorus 2:]
Just like a chainsaw
Her teeth cut in
Watch out now here she goes again

A Look Back: SJA Homecoming 2007

Oh goodness. My early dresses still astound me. I have a few earlier dresses but am unable to find pictures. I have a couple from 2006, but the pictures are awful. If I can find them, I'll take new pictures. Anyways, This dress was worn for SJA Homecoming Fall 2007. What I find absolutely hysterical is that

a) I was at Berea already, therefore I was going to my prior, all-girls school, homecoming with one of my friends.
b) Everyone else was wearing black or very dark dresses.

In short, I stuck out like a sore thumb.

This dress was another 100% duct tape dress and therefore very stiff. I started using just plain gray duct tape and covered it with chrome duct tape, hence the Chipotle Burrito wrapper look.

Still, since this dress was 100% tape it was super durable and I was able to wear it again to see Panic! at the Disco the following summer after they dropped the ! from their name.

Working on a New Line!!!

Hey everyone!
I will be working this spring with Fashion Week Cleveland again and this time I figured "Hey, why not combine duct tape and literature in a fantastic explosion of creativity and a visual orgasm!?!?"
As promotion for FWC and a potential wearable art fashion show next year, I will be (hopefully) attending the pre-parties and also (maybe) Cuyahoga County Public Libraries during the days of the parties. Everything is still in the works but I'm very excited. I have as of right now 5 designs on the drawing board and would love to hear some input.
I will be basing my ideas off literary works (novels, poems, authors, etc). As of right now I have a "The Raven" by Poe dress, a "Leaves of Grass" by Whitman dress, "The Inferno" by Dante dress, and a few other rough ideas.
Look for updates in the near future and once I refine my designs, I'll try to post them on here. Other than that, enjoy this video of MCLars "Mr. Raven"