Miners Drag Costume.

After a few months work I have finally finished my FMP work and set it up for the foundation show.

Over the time working on this project I have struggled with making decisions on what materials and colours to use. I decided to use one of my designs from the previous post as a basis and move on from there. Instead of using strands of fabric as the skirt I ripped sections of cotton into strands and dyed them the colours of the pride flag separately. Then I printed some quotes from both the film Pride and my interview with Mike Jackson onto the fabric. These pieces were then stitched together to make a piece of large fabric to cut the pattern for the skirt from. In order to give the skirt more volume I added two extra skirt layers, one with navy netting to tie in with the miners uniform and one out of a chiffon to give it a shiny finish that still allowed the words to be seen on the bottom layer.

For the top half of the costume I decided to use a miners boiler suit and dart it so that it gave the model a female shape in the way drag costumes do. I then added sections of embroidery to add little coloured details such as creating the pride flag on the collar of the jacket. With the scrap pieces from the trousers of the boiler suit I made a corset and printed some more quotes onto the fabric.

For the show I decided to add banners with more of the quotes on them to tie in with the skirt, I also had the song "There is power in a Union" by Billy Bragg playing on repeat with headphones attached to the wall so that people could listen to it while they looked at my work.