Auroras Peak - Costume

Okay, so my role on this shoot was to be costume designer, which I’ve loved so far.

When Andre initially pitched the idea, I felt very inspired by the story and met up with him and Klara in the library to discuss ideas.

Andre then showed me his little notebook where he had cut out magazine clips and put them together to show me the kind of style he wanted the costume to be created in which was helpful for inspiration.

I then began to design the costume. I looked at the artist Maison Martin Margiela, an artist that really represented the style of what I wanted to create, as I had to design and make a full head mask.

I first did some sketches and tried different designs following the specifications Andre had given me and developed on those till the costume started to take shape and resemble Andres vision.

The mask was the most difficult part to make as I’d never created anything like this before. I’m quite good with textiles as I often sew and alter my own clothes so I have a little bit of experience working with things like this, but nothing to this scale.

I had to look into various different materials and keep in mind this mask had to be comfortable to wear for a long duration of time. So I had a look at different options I could use for the mask.
Originally, I thought some sort of morph suit would be easier to work with, but after shopping around online and even going into fancy dress shops, they all worked out to be way too expensive to justify spending the budget on.

I then thought of creating the mask out of stretchy material and sewing it together. I went to H&M and bought some leggings, which was the perfect thickness of material that wouldn’t fray if I cut it. I measured my own head and carefully cut out the length of my neck to the top of the head. I also incorporated the fact that the dancer has very long hair, so I left a hole at the top for her hair to pull through and flow down her back. I thought this would look pretty, but also it would give the costume more of a dramatic look. Hairography is often used in performances because it enhances the movements of the subject so I thought by using this in the costume, it would have more of an impact on the shoot.

My next task was to try and sew jems/sequins to the mask which would create the similar style to Maison Martin Margiela and reflect the lighting set up for the scene.
My boyfriends mum is really good with making things, so she took me to some arts and crafts shops in Kingston where we looked for the best type of sequins to use. We ended up visiting a shop called ‘Fabric World’. I bought 4 reels of sequins on thread I could pick off and sew on individually.

This was a really tricky job, as I didn’t have a model to work on apart from myself (and I obviously I couldn’t sew stuff onto my own head). I used a hot water bottle and planned and mapped out each individual sequin to a symmetrical pattern.

Even though sewing sequins onto something doesn’t sound too hard, it was extremely time consuming and difficult to make everything even. I also had the added issue of making them extra secure as whenever I tested the mask (making my little brother wear it and twirl around) a few sequins would fall of every time and this was an issue I had to address. I had to go over each sequin a few times and managed to fix them all on securely.

The rest of the costume consisted of a leotard. I did some research into the different styles and Andre chose one based on my designs.
I found one really similar on Boohoo.com that was far less expensive than any of the professional dance leotards. This again, saved a little money on the budget.

I had the measurements of our dancer, but the size I ordered unfortunately came out a little big. I had to completely reshape the bottom half of the leotard and using a sewing machine (which I’ve never actually used before so big achievement for me) managed to reconstruct the leotard to fit properly. I then continued to sew that until I felt happy with the new shape.

FINAL OUTCOME -