A few months ago we got a call from Glen Foerd, which is a historic mansion owned by the city of Philadelphia. It's a great example of 1920's gilded age construction. the guy who built it made a fortune figuring out a process for tanning goat skins and made a huge amount of money overnight. Yadda yada yada, it's now part of Fairmount Park and they do all sorts of cool things there. One of these things is to throw a massive masquerade ball on Halloween. So they asked if we could come up with a poster image that was over the top. I had a few ideas and @trillianstars went out to have a look at the place which was fabulous. 

We'd recently seen the Heartless Revival collection at Philly Fashion week and it included some extremely over the top dresses. Behold:

So....I thought that dress would go spectacularly with Glen Foerd. So we rented the dress. Which came with a crew of people and all this apparatus to fill it up with air, and we went out to the mansion for a day of shooting.  Here's what we did.

Some behind the scenes with all the people (Haley, April, & Kostis) necessary to make this dress work:

Once Trillian was in the dress she was stuck there. So there was a lot of setup and then getting her into the dress, then shooting, then getting her out of it. We did three different setups and each one was like 90 minutes setup, 3 minutes photographing. 

Here's how it looked from the back of the camera. I was using a Hasselblad X1D which is a ponderous and ugly thing but I've had a great time with it.

The photo they chose for the inside is on the magnificent stairwell in the center of the house. It took a few people to get Trillian there and get everything attached. 

The house has a built-in pipe organ.

Their party is on Halloween 2025 and it's going to be spectacular. If you'd like to go, here's the info.