Bastille Day Parade
- Kae Warnock
- Aug 18
- 2 min read
I am honored to have been selected as one of the designers for the 2025 Denver Bastille Day Festival in Cherry Creek North.
I designed four complete “looks” for the event.
My inspiration for this collection was the work of Paul Poiret, a designer who was influential in women’s fashion for the first two decades of the 20th century. Poiret’s designs eliminated the need for the constricting corset women had to wear in that era.
The dresses are an acknowledgement of Poiret’s contribution of the silhouette that became the sheath dress of today. The core of these pieces began as portions of vintage Japanese kimono that were destined for landfills. My work is to show that these beautiful handmade silk garments can be redesigned into interesting clothes and bags rather than being thrown away. While I rely primarily on vintage fabrics including kimono and lace, I hand-dyed some of the fabric accents using fiber reactive dyes and I made signature jewelry for each look in the collection.
When I create these pieces, I work with Japanese antique dealers to find unique fabrics and textures that are still au courant today.
My hope is that the models enjoy wearing these custom pieces as much as I enjoyed creating them. We live in a world where beautiful old things are thrown away merely because they are old. Perhaps it is time to re-envision beautiful vintage fabric as art that we can shape around the canvas of the human body for use today.
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