Making low-budget period costumes pop (ladies' edition)

[breakinglight11]

This weekend I did costuming for a period film set in 1915, "The Fair Fight" from Narrow Street Films, directed by KJ Traynor and Terry Traynor, who I met because he did some excellent fight choreography on my movie. I've become kind of known for my ability to fake long-19th-Century-appropriate costuming on a low budget, thanks to a number of years' experience working on Mrs. Hawking and the corresponding very large collection of suiting, dresses, long skirts, and high-collared shirts one builds in that process.

It was quite a large cast and utilitized a large chunk of my stock, particularly for the men. I had almost no daywear to spare at all after dressing the guys. In situations like that, it can be hard to make the characters distinctive in any way, when you're struggling just to get everybody dressed in something that looks right. But I collected some pictures from the set that I thought kind of demonstrated the approach I take to dealing with that particular costuming challenge.

One scene shot today included basically all the speaking female characters which I thought illustrated my approach well. Most of the characters are young women, many of them suffragists. I never managed to get a picture where every one of them was visible, so I'll have to show you a couple. But since I was kind of locked into a silhouette, and of course my sizing options are always limited, I tried to give each their own color and vary up the kinds of pieces making up that silhouette as possible.



The basic look is long, solid colored straight skirt, white blouse, and maybe a coordinating jacket. Upper class Edwardian women often wore "suit dresses" like this. So I tried to find as many iterations of that as I could. Patterned jacket over neutral black skirt. Long coat and coordinating vest over neutral skirt. Bolero-jacketed full suit. Faux suit of patterned jacket over skirt in a similar color. Faux dress look of a skirt and blouse that match, or nearly so, with a neutral black bolero. The light blue dress on Ashley was her own discovery, the suit-like lapels bridging the gap with the other costumes.



Here's another view of some of those looks, plus one more, the mill owner's daughter, played by Kate Eppers. You can see they're also each in a distinct color. Purple, brown, light blue, deep blue, green, red, burgundy. I find that, while it is painting with something of a broad brush, it's an easy way to distinguish characters from each other, and audience members have an easier time remembering who is who.



I wish I'd been able to incorporate more true dresses. inwaterwrit, who is wardrobe mistress on the Mrs. Hawking plays, has a preference for dresses rather than separates, and it would have been a way to include more variation. I tried to create the illusion of a dress with the very similarly colored burgundy blouse and skirt on actress Autumn Allen. But I don't have a lot of dresses that would look appropriate for informal Edwardian. I almost put the one I did have, in bright pink, on Kate, but I became concerned it would appear too close in color to the red suit. I went with the green look to spread the palette more. The green is attractive and interesting, though that satin shows every crease on camera, and it's probably the least accurate with its standing collar and three-quarter-length folded-over cuffs. I also wish I'd had more hats. They all should have been wearing one, technically, but I ran out. But at least it's another way to get visual variation.

I might show you how I handled the men soon too. My approach is necessarily more limited there, but there are still opportunities for distinctions to be drawn.