The carrier was always there, simulated with syflex. Then I deformed the surface over the carrier to make the cloth grow. This allowed me to make cloth pieces which had a shape of a tulip or even more twisted.
On the deformed surface I put a texture based deformer (not rendered displacement) to add more details to the simulation. This had the advantage that I get a real-time feedback. I did the texture in Digital Fusion, using some standard fractals.
I positioned the cloth pieces in a way a peacock has, and did some variation on each cloth piece. The matchmoving and the background was also done by myself as well as Shading and Rendering and precomposite.