When i first heard about the story of fashion designer Hedy Strnad, I knew i had to see the exhibit featuring her designs made real. Strnad was murdered by the Nazis in WW2, but eight of her fashion design renderings survived, preserved by extended family living in Wisconsin. In conjunction with the costume shop at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, ( Read more... )

This post is the first of more-than-one [1] concerning our final costume replica project for the Museum of Science Fiction in Washington, DC: a Stillsuit from the 1984 film, Dune.


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After my prior post on resources for working with esparterie [1], some helpful milliners and scholars commented or PM’d me with two other titles of books which feature chapters or sections on the material.


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Esparteríe has long been a research interest of mine, pretty much ever since i heard about its existence in my very first millinery class (1992), but actively since I took the position of crafts artisan at PlayMakers Repertory Company and discovered the four sheets of it in the stock here. Now that our graduate program at UNC-Chapel Hill is the ( Read more... )

You may recall that last year, i wrote up our first costume replica project for the Museum of Science Fiction, the flight attendant costume from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today i've got the next project installment to share, the Neo costume from 1999's The MatrixThis one came about because a donor gave the museum a pair of Airwalk buckle boots which ( Read more... )

Back in 2010, i wrote a post in this blog about making a brim block out of esparterie, the rarest millinery material out there. At the time, i had four vintage-1950s sheets of it, which i had found in the bottom of a drawer upon beginning my job at PlayMakers Repertory Company and UNC-Chapel Hill. Because esparterie (aka willow, spartre, esparta, ( Read more... )

In Bill Brewer's designs for Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, her second look has a very specific stripe to it. He'd found a swatch of fabric at a New York vendor which he loved, but there were two problems: the vendor sold out of the fabric before the swatches were approved, and in order to match the fabric up the center front in this inverse chevron ( Read more... )

We're working on Sweeney Todd at PlayMakers right now, which is largely why i haven't posted anything in a while. Busy! But here's a quick look at just one of the many cool costume projects we've had in-house: the animal.masks for the masquerade scene.

Our costume designer, Bill Brewer, and our director, Jen Wineman, were really drawn to the mask ( Read more... )

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My grad students in Masks and Armor this semester have just presented their first round of projects. At this point, we've covered a range of different maskmaking media, and the students have proposed basic mask projects for which they may choose which type of media to use. These masks are meant to be fairly simple, in that they don't require a life ( Read more... )