Except for my professional costuming work, most of what I do
is recreations of other people’s designs or I take a 2-D drawing and bring it
into three dimensions. This is because most of the conventions we do these sketches
at are media conventions.
Before the Internet, yes children there was a time before
the Internet, it was pretty challenging recreating a costume. You had the movie
or TV show to go on and for photo reference, if you were lucky, a couple of
fuzzy pictures in a magazine like Starlog. If you were really lucky there might
be a book on the making of with photos you can use for reference.
Now we have the vast resources of the Internet and there are
more magazines with photos. Also more films have making of books, which I would
have killed for earlier in my career. But we still had ways of figuring things
out and making it look right.
Historical patterns is something else that has changed a
lot. Even Halloween patterns didn’t really exist until the late 1980s in
standard pattern books. If you wanted to create some shapes, you would have to
draft your own, Franken-pattern from existing looks (hard for the fashion of
the 80s) or hope that Folkwear had a pattern for it. Now we have all kinds of
patterns and patterns that can be used for other things.
I remember a time before fleece when trying to make puppets
was the never ending hunt for the right kind of velour or another kind of
fabric that was fuzzy and stretched the right way. Antron fleece is still the
gold standard for puppets but you can use the fleece for them.
Fabric is always a challenge in costuming. You have to
decide if you are going for screen accurate or costume accurate. The lighting
used television, stage, and screen changes colors a lot. For example the 8th
Doctor’s coat reads different colors under different light in the TV movie but
is, in person, a greenish brown or a brownish green depending on who you talk
to. I, for the longest time, thought it was brown. My X-men coat is a prime example
of trying to find fabrics to fake the look from the film which was made from UK
materials. (Honestly I am still jealous of your stretch fuzzy furs.) I think I
did pretty well.
I find costuming a heck of a lot easier now then when I
started. New fabrics and new building materials have made things much easier.
Patterns are easier to find now that the big pattern makers realized that there
is a market for historic costumes and it is a large one. There are still a lot
of challenges in recreation which is why I enjoy it but it is nice that I have
more of a shot at getting it right now.
I am grateful for everything that has made it easier to
recreate costume designs.
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