Costume-making 101: Part the First – Inspiration

Hello everyone and welcome to the first of what I plan to be a series of posts explaining how I go about putting together a costume.  First, some caveats.  Now, I’m not everything I say here is the correct way of doing things.  I’m not even going to claim that they are sensible ways of doing things, just that this is how I do things and maybe it’ll help some of you whose brains work in a similar way.  I pity you if it does. 

Says the 32-year-old man sat in front of a laptop on a Wednesday evening, drinking red wine and blogging about costume making. 

Secondly, these ideas will not work every time.  The number of half-finished pieces I have laying around is beyond count.  They’ll be finished one day, just please realise that developing an eye for putting together a costume takes a little practice and a lot of trial and error.

Right, that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

So, for me the first consideration before starting any new project is to get a feel for the overall look or character that I’m trying to portray.  This could be anything from a particular picture, to an individual item of clothing, or even a silhouette.  I’m not always one to extensively document my inspirations, but I do have separate folders on my laptop marked up with the name of each costume to file way anything I’ve seen or read online that put me in the right frame of mind for what I’m trying to achieve. 

Now this may sound like a minor step or an inconsequential time-waster to some, but as I was discussing with my step-daughter only recently, it can really help get the ideas flowing.  By way of example, it was while sketching up ideas for her Comic-Con costume that she admitted to having had come up with a name for her particular character, a back story and a set of personality traits to help define how this fictional person would look and act, the weapons she carried and a proposed colour palette to set the mood of the look. Smart-arse. 

But this did get me thinking; at a point where I was stuck on certain details of my own costume project I took step back and tried to imagine my design appearing on TV or in a computer game and instantly I saw that certain pieces would need to be changed in order to maintain the overall consistency of what I was making.  My particular project had evolved from the idea of a US Civil War-era take on Assassin’s Creed, with a view to using as many period-accurate patterns as possible, adapted to fit the AC aesthetic.  I already had a number of the pieces needed in-progress or finished, but it wasn’t until I took an overall view that I realised the trousers I’d bought wouldn’t look right and the feel of the thing didn’t gel overall, both in the individual items used and as a concept.

Lateral thinking was needed.  And a glass or two of liquid inspiration.  Somewhere at the back of my mind was an image that I’d been toying with as inspiration for this project, the DVD cover of Sergio Leone’s excellent Once Upon a Time in the West.  Then it occurred to me – the reason this whole thing didn’t sit right was in my mind was that although I was pitching the costume as US Civil War, the image I had subconsciously fixed onto was of gun-fights and lawless lands, long overcoats and bandannas tied around faces, 10-gallon hats and six-guns.  So, time to adapt.  And another glass of wine when I realised this meant more work before the May deadline.

Now the point of all this is to hopefully stress that the starting point for costume making isn’t always walking into a shop and buying a pattern, or fabric or a sewing machine, but instead to establish the overall look or feel of what you’re trying to achieve.  Apologies if this all sounds a bit Yoda-esque, but having an idea of the end result can dramatically reduce the amount of unnecessary work you may end up doing, plus keep costs down and limit wastage. 

Next time I’ll be explaining how this revelation impacted on the individual elements of my own project and how applying the concept of a design to the reality of making costumes can guide your hand.  I’ll leave you with the picture that inspired this little creative endeavour.

It’s been emotional.