Drawing Cabaret Couture

Open­ing Image Kata­ri­na Lern­mark
Words Eve Fitz­patrick

Draw­ing Cabaret Cou­ture is an online art class put togeth­er by Janet May­er, pro­fes­sion­al cabaret dancer and mod­el, Matthew Lawrence, artist and set design­er. The class com­bines life draw­ing with haute cou­ture, tak­ing inspi­ra­tion each week from dif­fer­ent artists or themes. 

The par­tic­u­lar les­son that I attend­ed was inspired by the work of Gus­tav Klimt. The set design was incred­i­bly beau­ti­ful and intri­cate­ly planned. Imme­di­ate­ly you could feel the resem­blance to Klimt’s work through every aspect of their visu­al cre­ation. From the dress, to the wig, to the back­drop, to the light­ing, to the pos­es, you could tell that every ele­ment of the set had been care­ful­ly thought out, and it felt no dif­fer­ent from attend­ing a fash­ion edi­to­r­i­al shoot. 

As an ama­teur draw­er, I was a bit appre­hen­sive to begin with, not know­ing whether I’d be able to fol­low the class. But I was wrong. I found the two-hour-long ses­sion to be incred­i­bly ther­a­peu­tic and immer­sive, and I was able to take vast amounts of inspi­ra­tion from their work to apply to my own. 

The idea to merge togeth­er haute cou­ture with the work of Gus­tav Klimt real­ly ben­e­fit­ted my expe­ri­ence as it made me feel like I could inter­pret their set in many dif­fer­ent ways. The class real­ly allows for indi­vid­ual free­dom and cre­ativ­i­ty. Going into it I was expect­ing there to be a strict set of rules to fol­low, how­ev­er, the class real­ly allows you to focus on your own thoughts and ideas, and ulti­mate­ly serves as a val­ued piece of inspiration. 

This class is per­fect for any­one try­ing to escape the lock­down blues. For any­one inter­est­ed in fash­ion illus­tra­tion. For artists at any lev­el. For any­one who finds them­selves lack­ing new ideas to apply to their art and in need of some inspiration. 

Per­son­al­ly, I real­ly enjoyed the class. I found it to be wel­comed escapism dur­ing these try­ing times.

More infor­ma­tion regard­ing the class can be found at drawingcabaretcouture.com
instagram.com/drawingcabaretcouture

Here is a selec­tion of images from the class attendees: