A Miu Miu-inspired Sew Over It Vintage Shirt Dress

I love looking to the runway for sewing inspiration, and the Miu Miu Resort 2020 collection is beyond beautiful! Typical of the brand’s style, the collection offers up quirky tailoring, bold prints and girly-yet-edgy details; everything I love in a garment!

I basically want to make my own versions of every item in the collection, but this dress really sang to me:

Storrs London kindly sent me some fabric and I’d been dithering about what to make with it, but when I realised the print is close to the Miu Miu dress, a decision was made! Also, side note – if you’re looking for some bold print top-quality fabric, I really recommend Storrs, the fabric is beautiful, the print is rich on both the front and back (it really bugs me when the back is basically white!), and it cuts and sews like a dreeeeam! They haven’t stipulated or asked that I promote them or anything, I just really love the fabric.

On to the dress itself…I decided to use the Sew Over It Vintage Shirt Dress as my base to work from. The shape really lends itself to recreate the dress, all I did was shorten the sleeves because long sleeves aren’t really seasonally appropriate right now, plus I get hot all the time! The collar was the main area to hack, and it took a while to get right. The collar on the pattern has an interesting construction; one part that you attach around the back of the neck, which attaches to the front section of the collar, which is actually part of the bodice itself which folds back on itself (easy, eh?!). I completely took off the collar in the same way I did on the collarless version I previously made (click here to see) and inserted my own self-drafted collar.

The main thing to get right was the curve of the side which would connect to the dress. To achieve this, I (crudely) taped the collar pattern pieces together. I then folded over the seam allowances and traced the inner side to get one complete curve that would attach to the shell of the dress:

The next step was to play around with the overall shape of the collar. The Miu Miu one is enormous, and realistically too big for my everyday life, so I set out to make mine smaller. I tried a soft curve at the point, echoing the Miu Miu shape but it looked a bit lacklustre, so I went full point and I love how it’s given the dress a teensy bit of edge. It took four attempts (using old shirts for fabric) to get the shape right, and for the final one I used a remnant of white cotton that I bought for £1 from Taylor & Abel in Penge!

I love the finished dress and I’m so pleased I persisted with getting the collar shape right. I’ve only briefly explained the collar hack so if you’d like a more in-depth description of how I made it, please do get in touch and I’ll try to explain further!