Category: 18th century

Posted on

TV Review: Let Them Eat Cake (1999)

Starring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.  Costumes designed by Sarah Burns.

Buy this and other costume films from Amazon and support this site

This TV series, created by French & Saunders (a famous British comedy team; you probably know Jennifer Saunders from Absolutely Fabulous) is COMPLETELY HILARIOUS.  It’s set at Versailles in 1782, and Saunders plays the Comtesse de Vache (Countess of Cow), an AbFab version of an aristocrat who spars with her witty maid (Dawn French), hairdresser, and rival Madame de Plonge.  If you like historical humor, you will love this.  If you like AbFab, you will love this.  Nothing makes me howl as much as the opening 6 minutes of the episode “Murder,” when the Comtesse’s attendants leave her alone for two days, and she’s unable to get out of bed because — well, she’s an aristocrat! She can’t get herSELF out of bed!

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Berrington plays a Queenie version of Marie Antoinette, complete with ridiculous Austrian accent.

The costumes are definitely theatrical:  I think all of the dresses have fitted backs, some of which are incongruous with the rest of the dress; some of the fabrics are weird; and there are some non-18th c. aesthetics, like skirts of a different color than the bodice.  That being said, I really quite liked many of the costumes!  The wigs are great, it LOOKS like they used silk for many of the dresses, and sometimes a character will step out in something that will make you say, “Wow, I think they based that on a real historical garment!” See Marie Antoinette’s dress below, and the Comtesse de Vache’s blue & white jacket ensemble (okay the pockets are weird, but otherwise, I quite like it!).

I can’t recommend this highly enough!

My review:  5 (out of 5)

If you like this era, you might also want to check my 18th C. Costume Movie Reviews.  For more silly takes on history, check out Casanova (the David Tennant version), Lost in Austen (2008), and The Young Visiters (2004).

Posted on

Vampire Ball!

Last night was the annual PEERS Vampire Ball, which is one the few balls I still get excited about!  It’s in a great venue (an Elks lodge that has a beautiful look) that’s about 3 blocks from my house, plus people really go all out with the costumes — over the top historical, vampire/goth, scifi, fantasy, and hybrids of all of these.  There’s so much eye candy, and that’s the best part!  Plus there’s not only historical dancing but also a goth club with a DJ, so you can get the best of both worlds.  Okay, and 2 bars.

For the past three years, Bella Donna has performed two 30 min. song sets at the ball, which is always lots of fun.  We’ve rewritten all of our English songs so that they’re vampire focused (so, for example, “Sweet nymph come to thy lover” becomes “Sweet prey come to thy vampire”), and it’s fun to get to do something different than our usual Renaissance show… and we get to wear whatever costume we’re in the mood to wear!

This year I was thinking about wearing the Marie Antoinette dress, but it’s so huge that it would be hard to get into singing formation with the group and I certainly couldn’t do any historical dancing. So I decided to wear the Maja fancy dress costume, but I wanted to do something different with it. I came up with the idea of doing a Pierrot makeup, in line with the whole black and white theme.

To do the makeup, I used Kryolan Supracolor again, and made my illustrator husband do the black/detail work. Everything went swimmingly until I went to power the makeup, which you need to do to set it — I was using a brush and all the black smeared!  So I had to do a bunch of repair work, which was super annoying… I’m not positive what the best way would be to powder when you’ve got more than one color going on, does anyone know?  I ended up using a power puff and just pressing it, but it still smeared a bit.

Makeup pre-smearing

I wanted to do a new wig, and decided to try a 1760s tete-de-mouton just to do something different — something along the lines of this. I used a pretty ratty wig that I’d cut to be a hedgehog, so the hair in front/top/sides wasn’t quite as long as it should be to do full justice to the curls across the top of the head… and I ended up doing things a bit backwards, in styling the front before the back, so had to do some curls at the side/back top to pull things together. But it was interesting to try something new, and now I know what to do differently next time!

The clearest shot of the wig I've got, which isn't very clear; or, yes, aquanet is period!

I ended up recovering a mini-tricorn form and trimming it the vintage b&w ribbon I bought at Hyman Hendler in NYC.

Pierrot Maja

The ball was fun and I had a great time seeing new and old friends, although I didn’t do ANY historic dancing — bad me!  Instead after our singing sets were over, I pretended to be goth with some of my Bella Donna friends in the club room and had fun doing swoopy dances and “catch the bat, release the bat.”

Pierrot Maja
Bella Donna performing at the Vampire Ball
Posted on

A Happy Wig Customer & A Gorgeously Gothy Costume

I keep meaning to post more pictures of wigs that I’ve custom made for clients, but I’ve had a hard time remembering to get nice photos out of people. (If you’re reading this and you’ve got nice pics of you in your wig, I’d love to feature them!).  Luckily my friend Tara was on the ball and sent me photos right away!

Tara went to New Orleans for Halloween, and put together a fabulous costume.  Jenn of Ruby Raven made the gown and tricorn, and then Tara hired me to make her a wig.  She ended up deciding on a medium-tall pouf with lots of ringlets, in black with one white streak.  The whole costume turned out glorious — so much so that Tara won first prize in the costume contest at the Witches Ball!

I would love to take a costume trip to New Orleans sometime, but in the meantime, let’s all admire how fabulous Tara looks:

Tara and Paul in New Orleans | Costume by rubyraven.com | Wig by demodecouture.com
Tara in New Orleans | Costume by rubyraven.com | Wig by demodecouture.com
Tara in New Orleans | Costume by rubyraven.com | Wig by demodecouture.com
Posted on

Tambour Embroidery Project

So I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been doing some sewing… Although work has been busy, I’ve also been enjoying the fact that I have no looming deadlines for any sewing projects, so free time plus limited energy means I’ve been working on some noodle-y stuff.

You might remember when last year, my fabulous friend Francis made me some handmade reproduction Elizabethan shoes.  I’ve been wanting to gift him back, but of course he’s a costumer too, so have been trying to think of something I can make for him that he can’t make for himself.  We figured out that he doesn’t do embroidery, so I am planning to make him an 18th c. hand embroidered waistcoat.

I have dabbled at embroidery and I know it’s one of those things I can do, it just takes a lot of time.  I’ve been wanting to learn to do tambour embroidery for years, so decided that’s what I’d do on his waistcoat.  But since the waistcoat is supposed to be a gift, that means I shouldn’t be experimenting on it!  So I thought I’d better to a project for me as a learning experience.

To that end, I decided to make a hand-embroidered 18th c. fichu using tambour.  I’ve had some REALLY fine white linen in my stash for a while, which I’ve been using in small pieces for special elements, as I have no faith in ever finding linen this fine again.  I have Peri’s tambour frame on long-term loan, so all I needed was a tambour needle, the right thread, and some instructions.  I got the needle and thread from Lacis, and then read through the books Tambour Work and 18th Century Embroidery Techniques to learn the technique.

I ended up using a pattern from the 18th C. Embroidery Techniques book, as it helpfully includes a pattern for a late 18th c. tamboured fichu from the (Bath) Museum of Fashion.  I don’t love fichus that bunch up around the neck, so I decided to follow the cut of this fichu at the Met to hopefully avoid that.

So far, so good!  It’s certainly taking time, especially now that I’m done with the long continuous line things and am on the 5 million individual flowers, each of which needs to be done separately from the others (as I’m trying to keep the back of the embroidery neat).  The one thing that’s stymied me are the little dots, which on the original pattern are tiny spirals… there just isn’t enough embroidery to bring the tails through on the back, so I haven’t figured out whether/how I’m going to include those.  I could of course NOT cut the thread off between dot/spirals, but then I’ll have all those extra bits of embroidery thread on the back of the work…

Posted on

Movie Review: Plunkett & MacLeane (1999)

Starring Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, and Liv Tyler.  Costumes designed by Janty Yates.

Buy this and other costume films from Amazon and support this site

I’ve had a review of this film posted for a long time, and it was written based on only a vague memory of the film. However, my friend Shawna encouraged me to watch it again because the costumes were so whacked… so this one’s for Shawna!

Johnny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle play highwaymen — Miller is the classy one, Carlyle the down and dirty — who team up to rob from the rich in a generally very light-hearted, dark comedy, “modern” take on the classic buddy/adventure film.  Miller falls in love with Liv Tyler’s character, who’s a well to do lady who falls in with the bad boys.  Alan Cumming plays a super fop who is hilarious.  It’s fun and fast-paced and not too deep.

And… the costumes.  Oh, the costumes.  When the movie opens, a title card tells us the year — I’m pretty sure it’s 1748, but I could be off by a year or two.  Here’s why this matters:  Look, filmmakers — you clearly were not trying to make a Merchant/Ivory, historically accurate down to the toilet paper masterpiece.  Why throw a year on there?  Why not just let it be an 18th century-esque period-ish film?  Because lemme tell you, the costumes are a TOTAL MISHMASH of different eras, some historical, some not.  Someone will be wearing a 1770s pouf hairstyle and sitting next to someone else in a 1750s tete de mouton.  Liv Tyler has one scene (the ball) where she wears an 18th c. hairstyle, but the rest of the film she runs around with her hair down.  And the dresses are, by and large, totally goth-ified, sex-ified, and modern-ified, which you can see in the images below.  At least Liv’s are generally pretty… With the aristocracy, they’re very amped up and over the top in a silly way.  Many times it works, even when Alan Cumming (complete with eyebrow ring) is wearing the 18th c. equivalent of a purple Mad Hatter hat.  But there’s a minor character who, at her wedding, wears a sort-of-francaise that has, I kid you not, what looks like 2×4’s for panniers — it’s so bad I went and screencapped it from YouTube so I could show you.  Of course, the screencaps don’t really do it justice, so you might want to watch the scene starting at 0:43 yourself.

In the end, it’s a fun movie, and laughing at the costumes is part of the fun, so I do recommend it!

My review:  3 (out of 5)

If you like this era, you might also want to check my 18th c. Costume Movie Reviews.  If you’re in the mood for more silly-take-on-18th-century, I specifically recommend the following costume movies:  Abduction Club (2002), Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), Casanova with David Tennant (2005), and Fanny Hill (2007).