“I’ve always been obsessed with fashion,” says fashion designer Claudia Twisk. After four years of studying womenswear, the Australian native traveled the globe designing for brands like The Row, Eckhaus Latta, and Uniqlo. While she now lives in Paris and works as a senior designer at A.P.C., Claudia spent last year moonlighting as a wedding dress designer—with herself as a client.
Initially, Claudia never intended to design her own gown. “I remember my mom being like, ‘Never make your wedding dress. You will be up all night. You will never sleep,’” says the designer. “So that was always in the back of my mind.” However, she did have a very specific vision of what she would wear to marry Dimitri Limberopoulos—her partner of eight years—at their French chateau wedding. “I wanted theatre, and I wanted fashion as performance. I wanted it to just be this feast for the senses and to just go really big,” she shares. “We’ve been together for so long and all of our friends are such creatives, so I just wanted to have so much fun.”
Photo: Pablo Laguia
Photo: Pablo Laguia
Claudia’s dream dress was a design by John Galliano for Dior from the brand’s fall 2007 couture collection. “I realised that it was a skirt and a top that kind of looked like a dress. I knew that maybe I could find one of those pieces,” she says. The bride gave herself a timeline to search through vintage collections and auction house sales for this couture creation before coming up with a plan B. “I had about six months left and knew I was going to have to give up,” says Claudia. “But I was like, ‘Why can’t I put my own creative spin on this? I’m actually just gonna make the dress that I really want on my own, take bits of inspiration from all my favourite bridal and couture designers, and make something really unique.’ It opened up a lot more creativity.”
“I started by looking for the right fabrics, because I knew that they would give structure, form,…
