Rachel E. Pollock's Blog: La Bricoleuse aggregate and more..., page 30

Museum of Science Fiction Replica #2: The Matrix

You may recall that last year, i wrote up our first costume replica project for the Museum of Science Fiction, the flight attendant costume from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today i've got the next project installment to share, the Neo costume from 1999's The Matrix.

This one came about because a donor gave the museum a pair of Airwalk buckle boots which were purportedly used in the making of the film, and they wanted to create an exhibit around those boots, a display of the full costume loo...

Madame Sheeta's Millinery Legacy - Part One

Back in 2010, i wrote a post in this blog about making a brim block out of esparterie, the rarest millinery material out there. At the time, i had four vintage-1950s sheets of it, which i had found in the bottom of a drawer upon beginning my job at PlayMakers Repertory Company and UNC-Chapel Hill. Because esparterie (aka willow, spartre, esparta, sparterie, espatra, etc.) is so rare, that comprised the one and only time i'd worked with it. I'd also provided a portion of a piece to one...

digital textile design for Mrs Lovett

In Bill Brewer's designs for Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, her second look has a very specific stripe to it. He'd found a swatch of fabric at a New York vendor which he loved, but there were two problems: the vendor sold out of the fabric before the swatches were approved, and in order to match the fabric up the center front in this inverse chevron, one half of the skirt would have had to be cut inverted, which creates a visual anomaly in textiles with satin weaves.


Concept slide and de...

Faceted masquerade masks for Sweeney Todd

We're working on Sweeney Todd at PlayMakers right now, which is largely why i haven't posted anything in a while. Busy! But here's a quick look at just one of the many cool costume projects we've had in-house: the animal.masks for the masquerade scene.

Our costume designer, Bill Brewer, and our director, Jen Wineman, were really drawn to the mask designs of an artist named Steve Wintercroft. Wintercroft creates masks which look like the faceted shapes of 3D digital character de...

Book review: Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

Winterhalter's 1865 portrait of Empress Elizabeth of Austria
in a gown by Charles Worth and diamond star ornaments dressed into her hair
While book reviews are a fairly common feature in La Bricoleuse, i should preface this one with a bit of a caveat, because it’s highly irregular that the subject of such a review would be a novel. The book features have typically addressed nonfiction of a costume-related bent, such as Shoes: An Illustrate History by Rebecca Shawcross or The Spoonflow...

Mask class projects!

My grad students in Masks and Armor this semester have just presented their first round of projects. At this point, we've covered a range of different maskmaking media, and the students have proposed basic mask projects for which they may choose which type of media to use. These masks are meant to be fairly simple, in that they don't require a life cast or any full-head structural elements.

Check out what they made!




Fosshape/buckram/kanakelon Noh theatre mask by first year grad Michelle...

Fiction Reviews for Still Weird

Exciting news: I'm going to be doing the occasional novel review for the webzine Still Weird!

My first post, concerning Cathi Unsworth's novel The Singer (2009, Serpent's Tale), is here:

http://www.stillweirdzine.com/2016/01...

3D printed St. Stanislaus medal

For our current production of Three Sisters, we had to make the Order of St. Stanislaus medal for the character of Kulyegin.

Our costume designer, Tracy Christiansen, provided me with this great research image of what the medal looks like:




...but we certainly didn't own one, and buying one would've been $100+, not in the budget. So it fell to crafts to make one for stage.

In the past, we might have sculpted it from polymer clay or Friendly Plastic, and just last year i would have said th...

Book review: Fashion Victims - The Dangers of Dress Past and Present

I recently finished reading the excellent new book from fashion historian Alison Matthews Davis, Fashion Victims - The Dangers of Dress Past and Present, and my advice to the readership of this blog is, in short, get your hands on a copy. It's fantastic.

I'm not sure which came first, he book or the eponymous exhibit which ran at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto recently--the book is much more than an exhibit catalogue, though it does contain a substantial number of illustrations (129 f...

Decorative Arts class: footwear projects!

Wow, i can tell it's been a busy season and semester--no posts since October! But, the semester's winding down and i found some time to blog. Today, a survey of some of my students' footwear projects for the class i'm teaching this semester! (If you follow me on Instagram, you'll have gotten a realtime peek at some of these already...)




Button-boot spats by first year grad Michelle Bentley


Crossweave faille button boots by first year grad Robin Ankerich


Top left: velvet spats...