In this recent SNL short, Neil Patrick Harris rocks out the Doogie Howser theme, accompanied by the SNL orchestra, all wearing Doogie Howser costumes. It’s pretty awesome! Apparently a Doogie Howser costume is just a white lab coat and a curly blond wig. What I like the most is the dancing girls wearing the Doogie Howser costumes over their silver jumpsuits. Hilarious!
Now this just leaves me wondering why I haven’t seen any Doogie Horrible costumes anywhere.
For some great–and hilarious–costume inspiration, I like to turn to old British television shows.
Here are Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry from Jeeves and Wooster. My, don’t they look dashing! Why don’t men wear hats anymore?
A favorite of mine is Black Adder, a show from the 80s which spanned four seasons and four different time periods (more, if you include the specials Black Adder Christmas Carol, and Black Adder Back and Forth).
In season one, Rowan Atkinson plays Edmund Blackadder, son of King Richard III, in the late 1400s.
In the second season, Blackadder appears as a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court in the late 1500s.
The third season is my favorite. It takes place in the late 1700s, with Hugh Laurie as Prince George. The costumes in the last season are the less spectacular–though by no means awful–somber military garb as Blackadder and crew serve in WWI.
But if history isn’t your thing, I do have a sci-fi show to recommend as well–the cult classic, Red Dwarf. It ran for eight seasons and was rife with wacky adventures and, of course, crazy costumes. I’ll just let these screenshots speak for themselves.
These shows are perfect when I just feel like sitting back, relaxing, feasting my eyes on great costumes, and having a good laugh while I’m at it. What about you–are there any TV shows you love with great costumes?
Spring is slowly inching its way forward here in the northern hemisphere, and you know what that means. Before you know it, Ren Faire season will be upon us! Because of this realization, I’ve been thinking about historical costumes a lot more than usual, and I thought maybe the My Disguises audience would like to think about it too.
Ren Faires are full of the fun and fantastical costumes, which is definitely awesome in its own right. They just wouldn’t be the same without all the fairies, elves, and pirates. But today I’m going to address the other side–like I said, historical costumes. A lot of people would like to wear more historically accurate costumes, but they don’t know where to start and they don’t know the facts, so they just get costumes that look like costumes they saw in some movie sometime.
Free hint: Movies are basically never the best resource for historically accurate costumes. Of course, if you want to dress up like the characters, that’s fine, and I won’t complain. Film costumes are pretty, after all!
When it comes down to trying to create accurate period costumes, there are two basic resources available. They both have their pros and cons, and they both require a certain amount of thought and discernment from the researcher, but until someone invents time travel, it’s simply the best we can do.
The first resource is extant pieces of clothing. These are actual pieces of clothing from the Middle Ages that have survived, at least partially, and have now been excavated, preserved, and studied. Learning about these articles is about as close as we can get to the real thing. (Well, they are the real thing). These ancient pieces of clothing, while there are not many of them, can tell us generally about the way clothing was constructed and the types of fabric that were used. Some of the luckier finds involve entire outfits found on bodies, which tell us how clothing was worn, what pieces were worn together, and how the clothing was different between the genders.
On the other hand, a lot of the study that has been done on these pieces amounts to mostly speculation. Some of the “clothing” that have been found, were really just mostly-rotted scraps of fabric, and the researchers just had to guess what piece of clothing it might have been, based on where it was found in relation to a body (if there was a body nearby at all!) and if there was any indication of a seam or hem on the scrap of fabric. Furthermore, dating the clothing is done with carbon-14 dating methods, which is not very exact.
As you can see, there is a lot of guesswork involved when dealing with extant pieces of clothing. But at the same time, the piece of clothing can tell us everything about itself, even if we have to guess about its context.
But enough blathering about that! Here are some useful websites that deal with studying extant pieces from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Marc Carlson’s “Some Clothing of the Middle Ages”. The site includes tons of information on extant pieces of clothing, categorized by type of clothing. There are diagrams of the clothing, measurements of the pieces, if they were found with a body or other pieces of clothing, what fabrics they were, and what time period they were probably from. He also has an extensive bibliography which can lead you to more information, if you can get your hands on the books.
Viking Resources for the Re-Enactor is one of the more comprehensive sites I’ve found addressing Viking clothing. Unfortunately it has a lot more words than images, but the descriptions are pretty clear, and it should give you a pretty good idea of what the Vikings wore in regards to entire outfits. On that same subject, this PDF addresses in detail the apron-dress of Viking women, including some clear and useful information on what is called the Hedeby (or Haithabu) fragment, a piece of cloth which is believed to have originally been an apron-dress.
Reconstructing History: Articles is another good resource from a researcher who regularly deals with extant pieces of clothing. Many of the articles will go into detail and give diagrams for the construction of the piece. She also has tons of other information about medieval and Renaissance clothing.
The other resource is historical art. Art previous to the middle ages is so rare and stylized that we won’t even get into it. Medieval art is not very detailed when it comes to drawing the clothing, so it takes a fair amount of interpretation. This is why it’s useful to take information both from the paintings and from the extant pieces, to try to figure out what the clothing was really like. Paintings do give a certain amount of context, so you can see what types of clothing were worn in what types of situations, and that kind of thing.
Art was more advanced in the Renaissance, so there are plenty of portraits with heavy detailing, which makes it easier to see how the clothing was constructed and decorated.
The thing to keep in mind, when looking at historical art, is that they might not be entirely realistic. You know how, if you’re going to go get a formal portrait taken of yourself, you wear nicer clothing than usual? They definitely did that back then too; so the super fancy dresses covered with beads and pearls was probably not what they wore every day. Furthermore, there’s a certain amount of symbolism put into the art so that illiterate people could identify the subjects. In medieval art, saints and royalty were depicted wearing certain types of clothing so that they could be identified as such, whether or not they actually wore such things in real life.
To get the most complete idea of what historical clothing was actually like, it’s best to do research on extant pieces and on the art, and then figure out how the two fit together.
As far as actual resources go, a good bet is to go to your local library and see if they have books about medieval or Renaissance art. You know, the huge ones with lots of pictures. But there is also a fair amount of information on the web.
Tudor England has many scans of portraits of the Tudor royal family–Henry Tudor, Henry VIII and his wives, Elizabeth I and her siblings, and several others. Each portrait is coupled with a fair amount of commentary regarding the history of the portrait and the subjects.
Artcyclopedia is a good starting point for finding online galleries of historical art. And in that vein, Wikipedia is also good for finding threads that will lead to more information. You can start by searching through the History of Clothing, or you can look up portraits of nobles, or search for historical artists, and find information to go from there.
A Milanese Tailor’s Handbook is an awesome resource for Tudor clothing. This site is an online copy of a fashion book written in the 1500s. It’s hard to get more authentic than that. There are other similar books (not available in an online format). The most popular ones are Patterns of Fashion by Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d by Janet Arnold, and Tailor’s Pattern Book 1589.
This kind of research should give you enough information to make or assemble something that looks pretty accurate. If you’re not into sewing, it’s just a matter of creatively putting together the right pieces of clothing to create the right look. If you are into sewing, there are plenty of costume patterns available. If you want patterns that are truly authentic to period, I would recommend Reconstructing History and Margo Anderson’s Historic Costume Patterns.
Good luck! And have fun at the Ren Faire! I know I will.
This is the story of how I made a costume out of newspaper!
Some advice for anyone who wants to try this at home: Try it! It’s fun, and you can experiment with fashion ideas without worrying about ruining expensive fabric. Be careful though — newspaper is very stiff and fragile. This makes it difficult to work with, or simply, it’s very different than working with fabric.
The first thing I did was come up with a design idea. I wanted something that would look awesome, but would be pretty easy to make. I decided on a fairly simple Victorian-style dress. Not that easy, maybe, but it definitely would look awesome. I also decided to use black and silver duct tape, which would not only hold it together, but would look like a nice trim.
I decided on a long, pleated skirt, with a few embellishments in the back to simulate a bustle, but in a way that really emphasized the medium of newspaper. I decided on pleats because I knew that newspaper would be basically impossible to gather, but pleats achieve nearly the same effect and would work much more nicely with the stiffness of the medium.
The skirt was easy. I didn’t need a pattern, I just taped a lot of sheets of newspaper together into one very long piece, and cut it off to the correct length for a skirt. Then I pleated the middle of it, taping down the pleats at the top, until it was a good length to fit around my waist with enough overlap. Here’s a photo of the skirt at that point.
The skirt just wraps around and tapes closed in the front. I also added a cool folded detail to the edge of the front overlap.
From there it was a simple matter of rolling up a few sheets of newspaper for the bustle in the back, and adding more duct tape for embellishment.
Now, unfortunately, I didn’t get any work in progress photos of the top of the dress, so I’ll just have to describe it to you. I knew that making the top wouldn’t be as easy as the skirt, so I decided to use a pattern for it. Even with that, I ended up choosing a kind of advanced pattern. The only reason I chose it was because I had used it before, and because I thought it would work well with the newspaper (I was half right and half wrong on that count).
So I started out just like I was sewing something normal–finding the pattern pieces I needed and cutting them out of the newspaper (okay, so the newspaper part wasn’t normal, but the process was). From there, I actually had to cut the newspaper pattern pieces smaller. Because I wouldn’t be making real seams, I cut off the seam allowance so that I could tape the pieces together, with the edges right next to each other. By the way, taping is much faster than sewing. I was surprised at how quickly I made this costume! Sewing it would have taken weeks!
So I just taped the pieces together to make the bodice of the dress. There was one unlucky surprise–I didn’t realize that the sleeves were supposed to be gathered into the armscye, so I had to make do by making tiny pleats until the sleeves fit onto the bodice. Overall I think it made the sleeves look kind of crumpled, but I don’t think there was any way to prevent that.
The bodice pattern is designed to close in the front with buttons–instead I just used pieces of black tape to serve that purpose.
Then I decided to go one step further to make the costume even more awesome, and added a hat. My original idea was to have a witch hat with a very wide brim, with rolled up newspaper to match the “bustle” on the skirt. So I made the brim first . . . only to discover that it was far too heavy. It was just too much newspaper, and it couldn’t support its own weight!
I thought about reinforcing it with cardboard, but ultimately decided that a change of hat design was a better idea. Instead of wide, I would go with tall, and to continue the rolled-up newspaper motif, I made two long “plumes” to go on the side of the hat. The hat itself would just be a cone, like a witch hat, but without a brim at all.
I’m not sure how many hours it took, but I used up about 3 full newspapers making this costume!
With both Zombie Day and Halloween drawing closer, you’re going to need some gruesome wounds, stat! I hinted at my own wound-making recipes in a past post, but now all shall be revealed!
My favorite way to make nasty-looking wounds is with unflavored gelatin. It doesn’t necessarily have to be unflavored; if you want your wound to have different colors from flavored gelatin that’s up to you! (You should bear in mind though, that colored gelatin will probably stain your skin.) The great thing about this method is that you can use various additional media to create many different textures, and you don’t need any special glue to attach the wound to your skin. Just glob it onto you while it’s still wet and let it dry on you; it will stick by itself.
Take some cotton balls and get them wet with hot water. Stir it around to sort of break them up. Add the gelatin. How much you add isn’t that important, it will just make the texture a little different, so you can experiment. It’s better to add too much than too little, because without enough gelatin, the cosmetic won’t solidify or stick to you.
Once you have the gelatin stirred in and it’s cooled down enough to handle, glob it onto your skin and sculpt it with your fingers so that it looks how you want it to. The cotton balls give it kind of a fibrous, lumpy texture. Once the wound has dried and solidified, you can add makeup to it. Paint it to match your skin tone, then add blood, bruise colors, or whatever other colors you need. You can stick in things like pins, bolts, or other hardware, fake eyeballs like in the awesome droopy-eye wound shown above, fake knives or other costume props, or sew big uneven stitches into it.
When you’ve finished with your creepy shenanigans, the wound will peel off with a little effort, or you can try dissolving it off with water.
You don’t have to use just cotton balls, either. Try using corn flakes, tissues or toilet paper, shredded paper, or anything else you want to experiment with! All of these media will give you different textures, so think about how you want your wound to look before you make it. You can even try mixing different media together.
Similar types of wounds can be made with latex glue, or liquid latex that’s safe for use on skin, instead of gelatin. That might not be as cheap, but it depends on what’s available to you. Here’s an Instructable for using latex and toilet paper. It will also give you some good ideas about shaping wounds and creating additional, realistic textures.
You can also make great wounds using marshmallows. Just mash up some marshmallows with your fingers, and shape them to the size you want. These ones are cool because they remain soft and gushy while still maintaining basically the same shape. You should mostly paint them and decorate them before you put them on, and you have to glue them on with latex glue or spirit gum. Once they are glued on to your skin you can add some of the messier effects like blood.
Speaking of blood, I’ve given this recipe before, but it bears reiteration. It’s simple! Just mix together corn syrup with enough red food coloring to get the shade of red you desire. Common additional ingredients are cocoa powder to make it darker and to give it a realistic brownish color when it dries, peanut butter to make it thicker, or liquid soap to make it slimier.
What I have yet to figure out or find is a recipe for realistic-looking fake pus. On the other hand, maybe that’s just a bit too gross.
As a bonus, here’s some instructions from Indy Mogul on how to make a fake brain!
Harry Potter characters continue to be a very popular choice this Halloween. But for people who want their costume to be extra awesome, I’ve found this tutorial on Instructables about how to make a wand that lights up at the tip! Everyone else with their plain-old-boring wands will be totally jealous!
This is where you can find the instructable.
The basic premise is that you build a wand with a LED in the tip, and a simple circuit connecting it to a battery and a switch. You can turn the light on and off whenever you need to–but be sure to say the spells Lumos and Nox when you do it! It’s simple and brilliant.
If you’re like me, you’ll look for any opportunity to dress up in costumes. Well, now’s the time to do it! Don’t wait until Halloween! The holiday used to be a one day event, but celebrations of the dark and scary have been steadily extending over the years. Some places start their Halloween celebrations as early as the first week of September! The fact is that if it’s connected to Halloween at all, it’s an excuse to wear a costume—so go out there and party!
Finding local haunted houses, corn mazes, haunted forest events is a good way to start. If you dig around, you’ll find that a lot of companies will be hosting their own Halloween events, like hotels offering “ghoulish getaways,” or theme parks and other recreational places having haunted nights. Then of course there are huge tourist attractions, like the Haunted Happenings festivities which go on for a month in Salem, Massachusetts, every year.
But why should you be satisfied with what everyone else has to offer? Here are some ideas you can do yourself!
1. Get a few of your friends together and create your own haunted something—haunted house, party, scavenger hunt, whatever—then invite a lot of your other friends over to this party, without letting them in on it. Stage supernatural events and see if you can freak your friends out—or at least get them to appreciate your awesome ghost costume.
2. Grab your friends, a video camera, and a bunch of costumes, head out to a secluded area, and film your own impromptu horror film. Even if the film doesn’t turn out that great, you’ll still have fun doing it.
3. Don’t have just one party on Halloween night—have several, leading up to it. You can choose a grisly theme and have it slowly build up until your last party is a horror extravaganza to celebrate Halloween right. If you disguise the parties as something else, and pretend they’re not Halloween parties, people won’t think you’re weird and obsessive—but by the time your last party comes around, they’ll realize how much fun it was!
4. Four words: Murder Mystery Party Games. The awesome part of this one is that it doesn’t have to be connected to Halloween at all. You can play them at any time of year—but Halloween is an excuse to play them even more.
Those are all the ideas I have for now. The important thing is to take full advantage of this season. Wearing costumes is built into the holiday, so not only should you dress up as often as you can, but you should be looking for any reason to do so.
The Fly. It’s a horror film classic, whether you prefer the 1958 original or the 1986 remake. It’s a great story about a scientist whose experiments go wrong, combining him with a fly into one horrible monster. “That’s old stuff,” some might scoff, preferring new horror about girls coming out of TV screens and ghosts with grudges. But this old story has been given new life as an opera, which premiered in the US earlier this month in Los Angeles. It’s an interesting blend of old and new, cult film and high opera.
Unfortunately, it’s received less-than-awesome reviews concerning the singing and score, but they had nothing bad to say about the set design, and of course, the costumes. I’m intrigued by what I’ve seen online. Transforming a man into a fly-monster onstage certainly can’t be an easy task, and his costumes reportedly become increasingly gross and horrific throughout the second act. Here are some images I was able to dredge up online:
Wow! Nasty! I feel sick just looking at them! I would have to call it a costuming masterpiece. The costumes may not be pretty, but are they ever amazing.
Halloween is less than two months away! I hope you’ve all started to prepare. Just in case you can’t think of anything, here’s a short list of what I think will be popular costumes this year.
The Joker
Admittedly, there will still be a number of Batmans running around, especially among the younger folk, but it’s clear to see that the Joker was the real attraction of the film Dark Knight, and I’ve already seen Joker costumes popping up all over the place, for events like the movie premiere and conventions. Undoubtedly a fair amount of these will be used for Halloween too. Some of them are amazingly accurate, all the way down to the green hair and smudged, worn makeup.
For the Joker, you will need a long purple coat, a light purple suit jacket, a green vest, a reptile print shirt, purple pinstripe pants, a green camouflage print tie, black shoes, and multi-colored socks (try finding Mardi Gras socks for that). Good luck! For makeup you’ll need some kind of temporary green hair dye (it’s probably more like hair paint), white 
cream makeup base, red makeup for the mouth, black makeup for the eyes, and brown makeup for creating the shadows and basically helping to smudge and dirty up the makeup job.
There are plenty of tutorials for making Joker costumes online. If you can’t sew, that’s not a problem! You can buy clothing at thrift stores that are similar to the style you need, but light in color, and then simply dye them purple or green. This article on Associated Content gives pretty good instructions for it.
Dr. Horrible
It’s not just us here at My Disguises who are obsessed with the bad doctor. Even though it’s been difficult for costumers to get the costume items they need to make an accurate Dr. Horrible costume, we know that they will do whatever it takes to get out there on Halloween night with all that mad scientist style.
We’ve posted previously about what’s needed in a Dr. Horrible costume, and there is plenty of fan discussion over at drhorrible.net.
But what if you want to show your love for this phenomenon, without looking like everyone else? If you’re a girl you can put together a Penny outfit. Why not go as Billy, Captain Hammer, or even better, choose another villain from the Evil League of Evil? My personal favorite is Dead Bowie, but you can choose for yourself. This post on cruftbox.com has a rundown of all the ELE characters, including screenshots of all of them.
Pirates
Even though there hasn’t been a big pirating film out this year, I think it’s safe to assume that everyone still loves pirates, and they will be strong contenders at Halloween for a few more years yet.
The great thing about pirate costumes is that you don’t have to base your costume on a specific character (unless, of course, you want to). They can be as fancy or as simple as you like, and you can make a costume for males and females.
The most simple, pared down basics for a pirate costume is a puffy shirt, and baggy pants, or a skirt for the girls, if desired, and a sash to tie around your waist or head. 
From there, you can go on to add hats or bandanas, fancy pirate coats, vests, corsets for the girls, big boots, fat leather belts, jabots, weapons, lots of jewelry, and any other piratey accessory! Make sure to decorate things with skulls and crossbones—I found some awesome silver skull and crossbones buttons at a fabric store the other day.
If you’re thinking about historically accurate pirate costumes, I’ve found that the Pirates of the Caribbean films are actually pretty good references, and corroborate a lot of the research I’ve done on the period (mid-to-late 1700s); with the exception of most of Elizabeth’s costumes, and some of the more obviously fantasy-based costumes. Of course, you can do your own research by searching online or checking out fashion history books.
And while I’m on the topic, let’s give another reminder that Talk Like a Pirate Day is just a few days away! We’ll hear more from FunkyLady on that soon.
Cosplaying is interesting. It’s one thing to dress up as a character you like, but cosplaying generally involves having to act like the character as well. Cosplayers pride themselves on having the most accurate, authentic costume possible, and when cosplayers start making up their own characters, things start getting a little crazy.
One interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed is something I’m going to call crossover cosplaying (this is not to be confused with crossplaying, which is crossdressing cosplaying). It’s when a cosplayer, usually for a humorous effect, combines two characters from two different canons. Sometimes a character from one canon is simply placed into a different canon, without being combined with another character.
Obviously, this type of cosplaying veers away from the canon image that is so highly respected in cosplaying, which is why this is done more for fun and laughs. It also requires more creativity in designing the costume than normal cosplay, because the cosplayer first must decide which characters to combine, and then figure out how to make a costume which represents both of these characters in the way the cosplayer desires.
This isn’t a very popular trend yet—in fact, crossover cosplayers are kind of considered the oddballs of the groups! Some cosplayers feel that crossover cosplayers are just mocking the cosplaying phenomenon, but I think they’re just trying to have fun with costume design and characters they love.
Let us know about some crazy crossover cosplays you’ve seen!
Previously we posted about Flight of the Conchords and the zany costumes they come up with for their music videos. But they’re not the only band that dresses up for fun!
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with wizard rock. It’s a genre that promotes literacy and fighting evil by rocking out to Harry Potter-based music. There’s much more to wizard rock that I can really cover in a pithy sentence, but what I’m really here to talk about, of course, is the costuming. Part of what makes it so awesome is that everyone can dress up. The bands dress as characters from the books, the fans dress up as witches and wizards, and even the instruments get costumes!
Music, Harry Potter, and costumes—all in one! It’s too good to be true!
Brothers Joe and Paul DeGeorge wear Harry Potter costumes for their band, Harry and the Potters. The two of them created their band, and wizard rock, in 2002.
Costumes on top of costumes! The Harrys don Santa hats for a Yule Ball performance.
Brian Ross and Bradley Mehlenbacher dress as Draco Malfoy for their band Draco and the Malfoys.
Jace of Catchlove wears a Ravenclaw uniform.
Joe plays a saxophone painted red and gold to become The Sax of Gryffindor.
Paul plays a guitar decked out as a broomstick.
Alex Carpenter of The Remus Lupins encounters a fan dressed as Lord Voldemort at a wrock show.
There are some pretty amazing costumes out there for this genre—I heard that Matt Maggiacomo of The Whomping Willows wore a tree costume once at a performance, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any photos of it!
Check out the Moaning Myrtles in their schoolgirl uniforms in this video!
There are literally hundreds of wizard rock bands—it’s become somewhat of a grassroots indie movement–and getting to dress up as witches and wizards is only part of the fun.
So which wizard rock band has the best costumes? I think Harry and the Potters win for their dressed up instruments, but why don’t you browse around Youtube videos of wrock concerts and decide for yourself?
More info on wizard rock, for those who desire it, can be found at wizrocklopedia.com
Images for this post are borrowed from the Wizrocklopedia galleries.
Sometimes, a costume is more than just the clothes you wear. Sometimes, a costume is less than just the clothes you wear.
Makeup is something we haven’t talked too much about around here. That’s because makeup is usually an accessory to the costume, something that finishes the costume to make it more complete. It’s not often that a costume is defined by the makeup alone—but sometimes, it can be.
The brilliance behind zombie costumes is that you can wear whatever you want—or just whatever you normally wear. If you had really turned into a zombie, that’s what you would be wearing. As far as costumes go, it’s about as simple as it comes. It’s the makeup that’s really the costume.
To be a zombie, you’ll need pallid, sickly-looking skin. Maybe with a bit of a greenish tint to it. You’ll need at least one wound—that’s the zombie bite that turned you. And if you want to be really dramatic, blood splatters are the way to go.
Fake blood can be easily made by mixing corn syrup with red food coloring. Adding a little cocoa powder to the concoction will give it a darker blood color and ensure that when it dries, it will look just like dried blood.
Making your wounds takes a little more work, but it’s so much more fun. There are plenty of recipes for this kind of thing. I’ve done it with cotton balls and gelatin. I have a friend who made amazing realistic-looking zombie wounds with marshmallows. You can experiment with other textures too, like tissue or corn flakes. The wounds can be glued on with latex (the kind they use in theater to attach fake beards and the like), and painted with makeup and fake blood.
You don’t have to wait until Halloween to do this, either. Grab some friends and make a fast and fun zombie film. Or better yet, participate in one of the many zombie walks that occur every year across the country! Zombiewalk.com is a good resource for finding one, or organize your own in your neighborhood.
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