How to Make a Flapper Costume

Video Transcript

"OK, people always say, I want a flapper dress. A flapper is not a style of a dress, a flapper's a life style. These are girls who bob the hair, wear short skirts above the knee, roll their stocking's down, smoke, drink gin, all that kind of stuff. But what they're talking about is a dress of the 1920's. They also say, oh, it needs to be fringed. Well, fringed dresses aren't 20's. That's the big different thing there. So people think, you know, poodle skirts are 50's, yes they are, but they came in in 1955. You had one, you didn't have a hundred, you had one. So these things get kind of just disconcerted, and we think, oh this is the iconic thing of the period, and a fringed dress has become the iconic 20's dress, and they really weren't. You used some fringe, but they weren't fully fringed. You see that later in the 50's and 60's of versions of the 20's. So, what we have in here are some things that we've created and added to. This was done for the production of Mame, and this a dress from a company called La Lux. They've got these beautiful, beautiful beaded dresses, and we line the dress in gray silk, a silk shangton, and then we actually built this coat and lined it to go with. And if you can see, the coat actually has an art deco pattern in the coat, and there's a head band that matches this. And that was one of Mame's outfits. And it's this big, kind of cocoon coat that's kind of wonderful, and you can see all the, the funness to it, then she had a head band with a big old feather on it, that was a lot of fun. And everyone, again, tends to think things are black, and they're really not. You're seeing things out of color context. We have stuff, like this dress, is again, a La Lux dress that we, we did a little stuff for Preferably Modern Milly, and it gives you kind of a peacock color, with purple and green. And we had this dress in red, we had it in gold, we had in in black. It's a great dress, looks really pretty on. We have a purple with a pink undertone, and what ever you put underneath it changes the color, which is so cool. And there were vivid colors in this period. I will show you a fringed dress, too, just because we do have a few of them. The one's I have are one's we did a long time ago for a show, this little red fringed flapper's, and these are pretty much shapeless, they just go from here down, and that's the idea of the 20's. Things hit you here, and here, and everything in between is flat. And that's kind of what this is. And again, it's a silhouette that people don't understand. They want to see things that are fitted and tight, and so forth, and we have that problem with a lot of periods, is they fit a certain way, and people think that, oh it's a 40's dress, so it's cut really low, they're not, you know, and the same thing with the 20's. And this is another really great dress. This is the beaded on chiffon kind of piece, that's a new one also from La Lux, beautiful color, great texture, great, great texture. I love that piece. I have a couple dresses that we built for a show called Boulevard of Broken Dreams we did in Florida, and this is one of them. This is a silk chiffon, really pretty, iridescent silk chiffon. There's a green silk one that matched this, and then she had a green velvet coat on, and this was done for a number called A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You. And I had, you know, green beads on here, and the other one, they all kind of matched together, and the director was like, well, could you close the coats up? So I was like, why are we going to make pretty dresses underneath here? It has an asymmetrical hem at the bottom, it's, you know, kind of like this, and then the curve shapes with longer on the sides, which is sort of typical in some of the dresses. But it's a very pretty piece. So you can go from like really beaded and really fancy, to very simple and plain, to very dowdy, and that gives you a whole variety of 20's looks."