Lissabonbon Vintage Cafe Berlin

If you're visiting Berlin this summer, check out the Lissabonbon Vintage Cafe. The cafe is decorated with vintage posters and furniture and sell cakes baked from vintage recipes. Defiantly worth a visit!

Corset for Amanda Palmer!

The end of last year I was lucky enough to meet a singer who I adore! Amanda Palmer formally from the Dresden Dolls was touring Europe around October - December 2013 and she came with her band The grand Theft Orchestra and played Berlin! I'd made her an underbust corset. She choose bottle green velvet with gold border details. I met her backstage that evening to give her her new corset and she was very thankful for it, gave me a beer and said enjoy the show...and thats exactly

what I did! The show was amazing and I was so proud to see Amanda Palmer wearing my corset!
Photo by Stav Barzilay.

Custom made corsets for Marlene von Steenvag

A few years ago I made two corsets for burlesque sensation Marlene von Steenvag. She wanted two different designs to wear for two performances. The first corset was a baby pink satin covered by a gorgeous blue and silver lace, trimmed with lavender coloured satin. The second was a white corset with a silver damask pattern. I made both corsets with 6 suspender attachments... here are some images taken by Berlin burlesque photographer Paul Green.

On the radio tonight! 100.6 MotorFM !

Just a quick update to say that tonight I'll be on the radio talking about my company Miss Moss Corsets on 100.6 Motor FM, a Berlin based radio station!
 http://www.motorfm.de/programm/off-the-record/
I'm being interview by Elizabeth Rushe who is also hosting a party on Monday 14th March at HBC in the Kino in Berlin. The party is called Cinéma and is featuring Dr. Sketchy and models and my company Miss Moss Corsets with models including the beautiful Burlesque dancer, Lady Lou!  http://cinema-berlin.blogspot.com/

Happy New Year! I think this one will be a good one!

So I have a lot planned for the new year!! A lot of exciting ideas and new projects lined up!

First off, next week I will be selling my designs at Japan Festival Berlin. The event is being held at Urania on Saturday 15th - Sunday 16th January 2011. 10am-6pm both days! I am really looking forward to it because it will be the first big event I will be selling my designs at! So I am pretty busy at the moment, working on stuff for that!

In February I have been asked to make a pin up style Valentines day collection for an exhibition called SemiDomesticated where it will be an opportunity for me to show my designs and hopefully get some buyers interested. Each piece has to be made with something vintage or an up-cycled fabric, which is really interesting. I went shopping for fabrics in England a few weeks back. I was looking for some power mesh to start making a girdle, and the shop assistant pulled out some very vintage power mesh that she said was from around the 1950s which was fabulous! Exactly what I was looking for!

Anyway before I exhibit any work, plans are being made to do a huge photo-shoot with Berlin based Photographer Markus Esser. I have a few models already lined up but still searching for some more. I really need models that have larger bra cup sizes, like E onwards because I am making bras for ladies who have a fuller chest. I want to show the different shapes and sizes that I can work with!

The collection will also show a variety of new Corsets as well as new items of Lingerie for my Spring / Summer Collection 2011!

Also have plans in February to start teaching a new Costume Course at Linkle Stitch 'N' Bitch sewing cafe. I plan to teach students how to make a female Costume from 4 different century's, starting from the 1600's. I had a lot of experience working on these kinds of costumes from this period when I was working in Italy! The next course will look into making a costume from around 1770, something you would imagine Marie Antoinette to of worn. Then a costume from the Victorian period to a very simple "Flapper" dress from the 1920s. However I am still researching all the details before I set a date! I will be back soon with more information!

New Burlesque party tonight!

Tonight I am going to check out a new Burlesque party in Berlin! It looks like it will be fun with some really stunning performers! Its called Salon Kokett and its being held a CCCP Club!


The line up will be: 
La Veuve Noire, Marlene Von Steenvag and DJane Tiga Lily playing music from Swing to Electronica.


I'm really looking forward to it and hoping it will be as fabulous as Boheme Sauvage which is a 1920's party that I went to recently and it was like stepping into a time machine! The people really dressed up for this occasion! The music, bands, performers and venue were fantastic!



I am sponsoring another burlesque party that will be held in Hamburg and Berlin called La Fete Fatale. There are prizes for the best dressed and the theme is Candyland of sweet temptation. With another variety of performers! It will be on 8th October in Hamburg and 15th October in Berlin! I can't wait!

Berlin, fashion, magazine articles & new corset course!!

Finally I have moved back to Berlin after living in Italy for almost a year! The experience of Bella Italia was wonderful and managed to travel quite a lot around the country and soak in as much of the art, architecture and culture as possible. I have to say that the Fashion, especially in Rome was a lot different to the fashion in Berlin (as I am sure everyone is aware of!) Everything here is so much more relaxed,  with people's attitudes and the way they want to represent themselves by their clothes and hair styles. In Italy I found at times people would stop with mouths wide open, staring and pointing at me because of my pink hair and way I dress but in Berlin I am just one among the many individuals who come to Berlin to get involved in this thriving city! I have to say...I am happy to be home!

Above is a photograph of the 5 dresses that I made for Atelier Pietro Longhi...they took me a long time to complete as there were a lot of small details and I had to work on 5 all in one go, but I finished them!  I am only just seeing the image for the first time now and it is from a performance at a masked ball in Venice last February.

I recently had an article written about my work in a Berlin magazine called Exberliner by journalist Jessica Saltz, which I was very happy with! It is the first article written about my label Miss Moss.

"Gemma's bright pink hair suggests modern sartorial influences, but her devotion to corsetry was born from a love of historical fashion, from Marie Antoinette to the Victorian corset to Christians Dior's "New Look" in the 1950's..."
"Her passion for the craft recently led her to Italy. Where she worked on historical costumes for Venice's Atelier Pietro Longhi for four months. The corsets that Gemma creates are not meant to be worn under anything but are timeless, beautifully constructed pieces that will last forever. So why not make your own?"

I have been doing some more research on Vivienne Westwood as I visited London a few months ago and ventured into a regular haunt for me when I am in "The old smoke"...The Victoria and Albert museum. What I love about Vivienne Westwood's work is that she is so inspired by historical costume and tailoring but she came up with a completely new fashion "Punk" which paved the way for her fantastic career in fashion! To come up with an new fabulous, unique idea is hard but I believe if you have the right creativeness in your spirt you can be your own pioneer!

She was also the first to bring to corset as "outer wear". Usually when we think of the corset in the 80's or 90's Jean Paul Gautier's corset for Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour springs to mind but it was actually Viv who revived this restrictive piece from the bottom of the dusty corners in your Grandmothers wardrobe and gave it a new life.

I have a new corset course planned for Saturday 14th August and will last for 6 saturdays, 10am-1pm each session...but unfortunately I think this will be the last one for a while. Now I want to focus on building up my label and try and find more work working within costume design for theatre, television and film. However I am sure I will run another one at some point but I now have other projects I am working on that I am hoping will take off very soon!

Also have a photo shoot booked for this weekend so I can finally get my catalogue of work up online! I will keep my blog updated!!

Little treasures found in Venice!

I started living in Venice, Italy in September 2009. I was doing a costume design internship with a company called Atelier Pietro Longhi in the heart of the city. It was a fabulous experience and I feel I learnt more from my 4 month internship there than I did in 3 years at university!! And living in Venice was a magical experience if not a little boring at times too. I refer to it as sleepy town because not much is happening here for young people!

In my internship I lernt how to make Elizabethan Ruffs, something I had been so eager to learn for a long time! I also learnt how to construct costumes mostly from the 16th & 17th Century Venetian Fashions. When work was over I asked my Maestro if he could teach me how to construct an 18th Century Corset as I have been looking at the construction in books for many years and found it extremely complex so I wanted to take the time to understand the construction of the undergarment. 

I was at Palazzo Mocenigo a few months ago. The palace was home to the Mocenigo family since the 17th Century. Within this palace is a small Costume collection which mainly show Venetian fashions and in one of the display cabinets on the floor was a tiny, heavily bones mid 18th century Corset, the construction of this delicate little masterpiece was amazing. So much detail and the precise stitching all done by hand as sewing machines had not yet been invented! I have also just found out that this Palace has a library of the Fabrics and Costume History Centre, which I will take a good look at!

So while I was working at the Atelier I was staying behind later to work on my very own 18th Century Corset. There are so many bones in this construction and I enjoyed every moment of making it except the hand stitching the bias binding on to each individual tab at the bottom of the Corset. The tabs are the tongue shaped pieces at the bottom of the Corsets used in 17th & 18th Century corsetry. The pattern on the fabric and colour I used was not historically correct but I just wanted to make something to test how it worked and with the final product it was more for a fashion photo shoot than to be historically accurate.

I ended up doing a photo shoot at an abandoned hospital just outside Berlin called "Belitz" I went along with a small team which included the model Stephanie Peregrinus and Photographers Ray Demski and Leena McCall. I was really pleased with the results!

A little treasure I found in Venice the other day was a beautiful metal mask. It stood out to me because it was different from all the other Venetian masks you see...and there are so many shops here selling the same product that its quite tiring to see the same thing over and over again, but as I passed a window in a small ally way which I had never ventured down before I saw this beautiful little dainty mask calling out to me. Nothing extravagant and bursting with colours, just simple black delicate pattern and perfectly fitting to my taste! 

Making Corsets and party over Europe!

Its taken me ages to add a new reply here!!

I have finally arranged when to teach my next corset course in Berlin and I am happy to say it will start Monday 14th June - Saturday 19th June! 10am-1pm each day! It will be held at Linkle Stitch n

'N' Bitch sewing cafe!! If anyone is interested in attending the course please get in contact!

At the moment I am working on some new designs but it is taking me a while to get around to doing them! But I have a range of materials to play with and hoping to get some designs made up soon and ready to put in my online shop! Also working on a costume I hope to wear to a fetish party held at Club Rub in London in May, that should be fun! 

Also looking forward to going to London to find loads of materials to use. I feel a bit lost here in Italy, the things I want I can't find and everything is a tad too expensive...makes you really appreciate cities like Berlin and how cheap it is! I am missing going to parties but just read that Torture Garden will be coming to Rome at the end of May, the weekend after the Club Rub party in London! So perhaps that is another date for the diary!