Lydia's Wedding Dress

The dress is for Lydia's wedding dress in Beetlejuice the Musical book by Anthony King and Scott Brown, lyrics and music by Eddie Perfect. This was my costume construction submission to the District IV Thespian Festival. My garment won me 2nd place honorable mention for critics choice and a superior for the critique.

For my main inspirations for the dress, I referenced the script and found an intimate moment for Lydia- after the ghostly Maitlands are found out by Lydia she reveals her mother's yearly summer haunted house and her playing Edgar Allen Poe's ghost. After doing some research on Poe I found that his wife's tale was also that of macabre, she was Poe's cousin and only a child when she wed Poe. I imagine Lydia loving this story and loving the wedding dresses from this time, 1850's, and wanting her dress to look alike to that of Poe's child cousin wife. The other main inspiration for this dress was early 2000s gothic fashion, this is because based upon Lydia's stories of her mother I believe Lydia's mother would have dressed with way. After her mother's death, Lydia would gravitate back to her mother in her wardrobe, leaving the dress to be a mashup of an 1850s wedding gown and an early 2000s gothic outfit.

The way that I created these ideas in the design is by focusing on the structure and fabric type. The structure of the bodice is structured like many 1850s gowns and also features a full skirt to emulate the elegant gowns. The dramatic off-the-shoulder look is for the early gothic 2000s along with the organza skirt. 

I also used color to illustrate Lydia's feelings, while the white is a staple for most wedding dresses, it also represents rebirth and hope for Lydia. She has just come back from the netherworld and chose her new family rather than stick behind in the void her "Dead Mom" left behind. And for that grief I used black, that void that she ventures into and escapes, but like she states in "Home", she "won't forget" her mother, so I made sure to include her still present grief in the dress. 

 A few of the techniques I used on this garment included; low density boning to hold shape but to also be flexible, french seams for any seam on the organza skirt, making bias tape, using diluted black fabric paint for the gradient on the dress, and using horsehair braid to make the skirt full without using more fabric.