L'Armoire de Barbette [III]: SKETCHES (Patreon)

COSTUME DRAWINGS, COSTUME DRAWINGS!!!! HOT OFF THE PRESSES!!! (at the very bottom of the post, if you just can't wait)

My dear, strange, and wonderful patrons:

One month and a half ago, I touched back down in Toronto from Paris late in the evening and had a virtual meeting the following evening with my costume team. 

Michael and Hannah had taken the discussion I laid out in your last costume post and drafted some rough drawings to feel out if they were headed in the right direction from all my notes and reference photos.

We agreed to meet again 3 days later (Week 2 of February) and they'd show me more refined drawings of what we'd take to Marianne, the seamstress, for an evaluation of costs and production timelines. 

Well ... 

That "meet again in 3 days" didn't happen. Instead, Life happened and more refined drawings didn't manifest. 

What I did get after a few more weeks were some simple line drawings to point at where different seams of the garments would open up and tear away. We were now under mounting time pressure. It was the end of February. I needed to be finished this part of the grant –create an act, begin the video documentation of it- by the end of April. I had laid out in my plan that I needed to be rehearsing the choreography with costumes by March, and I had two or three Residency session that TOHU had been able to find me in the ENC Studio Création that I desperately wanted to be able to test them out in. We were out of time for fancier drawings. 

"Do you trust me?" Michael asked.

"Absolutely," I answered instantly. 

"Good. Because I want to start construction on prototypes at the end of this week, and fit you shortly after that."

I was ecstatic – and nervous. 

Suddenly it felt very real that these costumes (though it felt like a minor miracle that they were actually, truly, really starting to come to life) could very well quickly present a whole new arena of sand traps, thorny obstacles, and pitfalls:

What if the garments don't remove the way the choreography has been built around?

Are there COVID shipping / supply chain delays still? What if it takes so long to get actual fabric and materials that it doesn't matter if we build the prototypes in time for my deadlines?

What if I don't like the way they look in real life, on my actual body*, at the end of it all...? (this would be a complicated and unpredictable dysphoria-y-type situation, and not on the part of Michael & Hannah's designs themselves, I mean)

*gulp*

But all those questions didn't matter: the train was leaving the station. I'd have to put my faith in Michael and Hannah. I'd have to trust that these rough sketches would come to life beautifully. 

Michael called me the next day: 

"Can you come in on Sunday afternoon for a fitting?"

* * * * * * * * 

Your NEXT post on Monday morning is a 5-minute SPECIAL VLOG in this 'L'Armoire de Barbette' costume series/offshoot of the 'Atelier Barbette' magic, taking you into the studio with me for FITTING NUMBER ONE OF THE COSTUME PROTOTYPES. *mouth breathing*

In the meantime, please enjoy the rough computer sketches Michael and Hannah shared with me at the beginning of February that I referenced at the beginning of this post:

Note: While the paniers (the things that stick out to the side on the hips) look super cool, visually call back to one of Barbette's vintage photos, and would be constructed of something flexible and durable ... I nonetheless asked Michael and Hannah to change this one design element: having structures jutting out from the hips would make it impossible to ever use the costume in a sequence where I need to have the straps rolling on or making contact with my hips. 

I didn't want to limit this costume to choreographic boundaries in future if I ever decided to update a sequence with a new trick (or modify it for an injury), so we all agreed on the phone that we'd opt for something more like a fringe harness – something flush to the body that would add shape and curve once I was in movement (especially spinning) in the air. 

And the references included in the presentation Michael and Hannah made me in that first meeting are as follows – highlights from the larger collected Pinterest boards we've been sending back and forth to indicate what we hope to do with textures, materials, embellishments, and so on.