Steampunking Dr. Seuss

It has been a wild and crazy, no time for blogging couple of weeks, as I having been working feverishly on costuming Seussical the Musical. The director wanted the "human that looks kind of like an animal" look for the main characters, which is harder than you might think to do well. The most challenging costume design was for Mayzie the Amazing Bird. She is what you might call a "bad girl", but this is a youth theater musical, and we wanted to keep it clean. The costume needed to be G rated and still express Mayzie's style and attitude. I drew several versions of her costume and none of them satisfied me. Then one day, it hit me- I needed to Steampunk it. For those of you that aren't familiar with Steampunk clothing, think Victorian plus punk. Very often clothing items are also worn differently than they would have been when they were worn routinely. 

In this instance, Mayzie is wearing things that are traditionally undergarments on the outside (corset and bloomers).She is dressed in red, black and white. She has a bustle and train, a funky fascinator, and the costume is rather sassy. She is also wearing a striped cami, striped tights, feather earrings and hair extensions, a choker, knitted mitts and a boa. 

The feeling of a tail was created by adding marabou trim to the layers of sparkle tulle that were used to create the bustle and train.

Red high heels would have been a nice touch, but she needs to dance and navigate stairs and we don't need any broken ankles, so we settled for black character shoes. This show also features a gang of monkeys. In keeping with the theme of pop culture, we have decked them out in hip hop style.  :)