In the pages of Debbie Roberts's fashion portfolio, the scenes are still but urgent feeling, with bright cold days and starkly gorgeous mid-century architecture. Along with every flouncy detail comes a certain sharpness, and the model's beauty takes on a serious and learned quality, connoting images of flowers—not real flowers, but technical pictures of them, rising up from slides and textbooks. Petal and Stem is an opulently feminine line by Debbie, its design features drawing literally from her theme: delicate pastels, tiered layers, and cutouts of pretty botanical shapes. What's best are the dress pants, marked with gobs of wool dripping down the outer thighs like heavy frosting. (To secure the shaping, she had to embed the cowls with tiny weights.)

Embellishing the blouses: pin tucks, slouchy bishop sleeves caught into tight cuffs, and a panel of crisp pleats that took a whole day to build. She used georgette and chiffon silks because they're floaty and elegant, but they're violently annoying to work with—the fabric always shifted so wildly on cutting tables and sewing machines. "It was like a living being, in a way." (In a New Yorker interview, talented British designer/alleged druggy racist John Galliano described a particularly slinky bias-cut swath of the same stuff as feeling "like oily water running through your fingers." Both are correct.)

For a time, Debbie studied under local menswear designer Michael Cepress. With him, she created a button-down dress shirt with a scooped front piecing, like a tuxedo bib, and its mini-striped fabric distantly recalls newsprint, with smeary blue font and stacks of columns. (The news is probably wonderful.) Her other projects are flecked with retro finishes, scalloped edges, and glitzy antique buttons. She draws inspiration from the firmly structured silhouettes of the 1940s—an era of tiny, cinched-in waists and jutting boobs, prim hems, dramatic shoulders. Immense, flowy skirts seeped into that decade's latter years; these were the shapes drawn from the postwar's moneyed extravaganzas and faraway romantic ideals.

Rationing had come with the earlier decade, and Parisians under occupation had to get inventive with materials. Garments were trim cut, of course, saving fabric, though some women made gowns from upholstery and artfully stitched-together scraps and looked just as lovely. Hats were built from cellophane and wood particles, and when nylon stockings ran out, women used liquid cosmetics to paint seams up the backs of legs and tinted the skin with coco or gravy-browning powders.

Attention, makers of fashion and workers of garmentry: Tell me what you're doing at marti@thestranger.com.