Dance is an art residing within the body. A twist of the wrist, an extension of the arm, an arch of the foot––these fluid movements channeled through the body outwards become intimate affective expressions that exist beyond language. Dance communicates what the spoken and written word cannot, providing the body with its purest, most direct, form of release. 

It is this relationship to dance that led to the creation of the Sabina Dress. During the early days of the pandemic and trapped indoors, Elizabeth turned to dance. Leaping and twirling through her new home in Los Angeles, the designer unleashed her excess energy. As Elizabeth herself states, “movement is a tool that helps me get out of my head and into flow.” Wanting to channel this same lightness of being into her work, Elizabeth came up with the design for the Sabina Dress. Made entirely out of washed silk, the Sabina Dress (named after a close friend who is a professional dancer) features an oversized silhouette and dropped shoulders—the cut and fabric alone make it ideal for pirouetting, prancing, and spinning about. “In fact,” states Elizabeth “it feels like wearing liquid.” When wearing the dress, it becomes a natural extension of the body—moving with it instead of hindering it.

Dance has inspired many artists throughout the course of history—from Edgar Degas who depicted the ballerinas he observed at the Grand Opera in Paris at the turn of the century to Wassily Kadinsky who understood dance as a series of rudimentary lines and curves. Claes Oldenburg even created a poster for a dance concert, splattering black and red paint across a canvas to convey the act, or feeling, of dance itself. 

From the figurative to the abstract, the depiction of dance—whether painterly, photographic, or sculptural—becomes a means to communicate the other-wordly language of movement. The Sabina Dress taps into this realm.