Scorpion Costume

This Instructables tutorial gives some great advice for making costume special effects and prosthetics. Check out Marshon’s other tutorials for more on working with latex.

Jean Paul Gaultier S/S 2010

Jean Paul Gaultier’s exotic collection of haute couture inspired by nature, Avatar, Mexico and the Aztecs, is a study in theatrical costuming.

Handmade Structured Garments

Lamija Suljevic creates these structural garments using old techniques and handmade details inspired by slavic tradition.

Making Carnival

A couple of articles recently on fashion and carnival on Diane, A Shaded View on Fashion.

Many photos of Rio carnival floats being created by students at Porto da Pedra, one of the 14 samba schools Rio, the theme is history of fashion from cave man to couture.

And here are some editorial photographs of carnival costumes.

MOCA Goes Gaga

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles celebrated it’s 30th anniversary with a one-off performance of Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi Ballet, deisgned by artist Francesco Vezzoli, with props by Miuccia Prada, Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst and Baz Luhrmann.

Kate Rawlinson: Pattern Cutter Talent

I came accross Kate Rawlinson via Kathleen’s posts on Fashion Incubator. These photos show pieces from Kate’s final collection while studying at London College of Fashion (more at Flickr). Her talent is in cutting and constructing the garments to line up stripes or checks perfectly. Read Kathleen’s original post, then if you fancy a challenge see if you can sketch out the pattern for this dress:

Star Wars Costumes, Props and Models

Photographs of props, models and costumes from Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. “The Art of Star Wars” was exhibited in 1995 in San Francisco, and photographed by Jason DeBord of Original Prop Blog.

And to update this post, here’s another set of Jason DeBord photographs from the travelling exhibition “Out of This World: Extraordinary Costumes From Film and Television“.

Viktor & Rolf Design Opera Costumes for Robert Wilson

Viktor & Rolf have designed costumes for romantic comedy opera Der Freischütz, which opens at the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden on may 30th. They described the designing process as comic-strip-like, and have used Swarovski crystals in abundance to make the costumes shimmer under the stage lighting.

Watch a video of the costumes in production, half is in English, but it’s highly visual.

watchmen movie-making blog

A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity… but who is watching the watchmen?

This is the blurb of the graphic novels Watchmen which are being turned into a movie. The website Firstshowing has been hosting a monthly video blog from the set giving backstage glimpses of the films making. This one is about the costumes, which span many decades, and clothe many extras as well as the prinicples. The other videos include props, set, stunt work, and Dave Gibbons, the artist who created Watchmen.

LIFE photo archive hosted by google

Google and LIFE magazine have been working on a project to digitise and make freely available almost 10 million images. Many of them were not originally published, so you may not have seen them before.

As the images date from the 1860s, and are available to browse in date order, this could be a valuable resource for visual period research. Each image also has information such as date, photographer and location.  

You can search within the archive in Google images by using “source:life” along with your keywords.

The full article on Original Prop Blog is here.