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A bridal gown and a pink flower girl dress on the runway at night, the bride in long gloves and a floral headpiece holding a trailing bouquet, the flower girl in a puff-sleeved satin gown and flower crown

Fashion Design

Fashion Unmasked, 1992

Bridal gown and flower girl dress — first-year assessment work

Designed, patterned and made by Lee Anchor

Two garments taken from first sketch to finished presentation — a satin bridal gown with a beaded and sequinned bodice, and a pink flower girl dress made to go with it.

They were shown on 6 November 1992 at TAFE Fashion Unmasked, held at Tropic Forest Garden Estate in Townsville, in the Fashion & Hair Extravaganza section of the parade. The evening was compered by Daniel Lightfoot and Samantha Kume.

The parade was the first for the new two-year associate diploma in dress design at the Barrier Reef Institute of TAFE — at the time the only course of its kind in Queensland outside Brisbane — and it carried the work of the twenty-three students who had finished first year.

What the garment involved

The assessment covered the whole of the making, not one part of it: design, pattern making, garment assembly, decorative textile, headwear and final presentation. Every stage was worked by hand, from the first drawing through drafting the pattern and cutting the satin, to the beadwork on the bodice, the veil, the headpiece and the fitting on the model.

The bodice, beaded and sequinned by hand over satin, with a double-tiered veil and long gloves finishing the presentation.

On the runway

The bridal section of the parade, with garments by the first-year students shown together.

The assessment card

The card mounted with the work when it was submitted.

In the paper

Newspaper clipping headed "TAFE parades new course's success", with a photograph of a student holding a white gown on a dress form, and an article about the first-year students' parade at Tropic Forest Gardens
Local press coverage ahead of the parade, 1992
Photograph: Mike Hilburger — reproduced as a record of the event

For enquiries, please contact lee.anchor@optusnet.com.au.

© 2026 Lee Anchor Sculpture. All rights reserved. I acknowledge the Gubbi Gubbi (Kabi Kabi) people as the traditional custodians of this land on which we walk, work, learn and gather. I honour and pay respects to their ancestors, elders and emerging generations.