Making a Good Omens Historically Accurate Cosplay : Victorian Aziraphale pt 1

[Music] foreign [Music] and welcome back it has been more than a year since I did my last historically accurate cosplay so I am due for another one and this time around I am really inspired by zero fail in good Omens this is a really unusual take on historically accurate cosplay however because unlike most of the other characters that I've done there isn't a specific era or one specific costume that I can really point to in fact zero fail being an angel has been around since before recorded history and there's even an entire portion of one episode where you get to watch him and the demon Crowley go through literally centuries and centuries of fashion so we've already seen what azero fail wears for a lot of different time periods and more importantly the costume designer Claire Anderson did an amazing job at making sure that they were relatively historically accurate so anything I would do wouldn't actually be showing you much of a difference in terms of the clothing instead what I thought would be fun would be to choose an era that we don't see so I was pondering that thinking about the fact that I have an upcoming event in Chicago that is meant to be a bell a POC ball so that's going to be set somewhere in the late 19th early 20th centuries and I'm going to be wearing the evening gown that I made back for the New York event over a year ago however the next morning there is going to be a tea as well and I was already thinking I wanted to make a new tailored piece for this so this seems like the perfect time to overlap those two ideas and actually adding on a third one I was recently contacted by the figure Museum in Iowa who is hosting the traveling exhibit of Fashions called outdoor girls that has a wide range of clothing from the 19th and 20th Century in women's sportswear styles and this is a massive beautiful exhibit if you get a chance to go see it I'm going to be doing two digital talks with them in April I will let you guys know as I get more information on that but as I'm doing all of this Research into these types of garments I really wanted to make something from that style so it only seemed appropriate that I would overlap all three of these at the same time into one outfit I found myself particularly interested in the 1890s what they called new woman and this is something that we today tend to think of as the garments worn for women when they started doing bicycling in the 1890s but in fact this outfit would have been much broader than just that one activity and it would have been popular for everything from walking through hiking and hunting and bicycling and so much more and quite a few women actually just picked up wearing this as their regular everyday fashion because they found that the regular fashion was too fussy so this is a really unusual and interesting era and at the same time it started formulating a story in my mind about azero fail who if you don't know is particularly interested in humans in general more so than most of the Angels especially when it comes to food one of the things that was popping up in the 1890s were women's clubs men had their clubs long before that where they would go and sit and talk and smoke and have dinner if they wanted women started up their own clubs so that way they had spaces to comfortably exercise and be active in or to go and sit and eat and chat so there were restaurants showing up that were women only unless you were escorted in by one of the members so I have this fun little story in my head of a xerophil wanting to go into one of these particular places around the UK or America and finding it far easier to dress in that sort of attire as a new woman rather than having to find an escort to allow him inside the one time there is no reason for me to need the story for the premise of what I'm going with I just find it highly amusing so that's what I'm sticking with so what that means is I need to spend some time looking at zero fills General style as well as the styles of that particular era and figure out how to easily combine them which thankfully stylistically also means things I'm making are going to actually be pretty practical every day where for me in terms of the style of things that I'm wearing so I feel like I can invest some time and money into this project to make sure that I have really good quality items that I can continue to wear regularly speaking of quality I also want to take a moment to thank the sponsor of this week's video Birch you may not be able to control what your day throws at you but you can handle it better with a good night's sleep that's why I'm so happy to introduce Birch they make mattresses and sleep products that are stylish comfortable and environmentally conscious not only do they offer the Simplicity of having a premium mattress delivered to your door but they understand the importance of materials they're non-toxic mattresses are made in America and are crafted with Organic and natural materials that have been sustainably sourced the Birch Luxe natural mattress even includes eight different layers of organic cashmere New Zealand wool fair trade cotton and 100 natural latex and by having wool in these mattresses it makes them both allergen and mildew resistant I've always had a difficult relationship with sleep waking up sore and almost as tired as when I went to bed it didn't matter how many hours I spent sleeping if I kept waking up constantly to change positions all night as a side sleeper with back problems I thought I would never find a mattress that could do enough but I can honestly say that with my Birch mattress I sleep through the night and wake up without pain and you don't have to worry about trying it out with your Birch mattress you get a 100 night sleep trial along with a 25 year warranty that means you'll get more than three months to make sure that you love it the mattress arrives at your door rolled up in a box with free shipping in the US and it was so easy to set up I love my Birch mattress and I think you would too if you're looking for a new bed check out Birch you can click the link below or go to birchliving.com Nicole Rudolph to get 20 off your new mattress plus two free pillows and if you're looking for a new mattress for your little ones also check out the new Birch kids line thanks again to Birch for sponsoring this week's video now let's get on to analyzing zero fail since we have such a wide range of costume styles for him we can kind of see what is his Essence it's not just one outfit but it is for the most part a color scheme he wears a lot of Ivory and beige mix of gold and silver tones a little bit of accent of a light blue but generally it's all pretty muted pretty soft and ethereal in a way I think that's the most important thing to carry forward there are some elements of his suit that he wears in the 1860s section which sort of crystallized at that point the costume designer does say that she specifically feels like a zero fail found his favorite fashion in that era and kind of stuck with it which thankfully for me I don't have to change dramatically in order to get to that 1890s new woman style it's not terribly different the image that I'm using as my main inspiration for this is this one I particularly like the lady who is standing and though this will be my main source I have literally dozens of other images and articles that I have looked at I'm just not going to be digging into the weeds of that right now because that will be part of those larger presentations that I'm doing and I might eventually do a video on the topic with all of the research but there is so much at this point it cannot be contained by one video alone let alone in the middle of doing a historically accurate cosplay so you're just gonna have to trust my research on this for right now I promise there's a lot of really fun things coming up but this is the style that I'm going for you can see it so many times over with the divided skirt and either Bloomer or Knickerbockers underneath I am going with the Knickerbockers so they're a little bit more practical because they're not nearly as voluminous as the Bloomers were they're very similar Style as well as a shirt sometimes waistcoat a very mesh style coat as they would consider it even a more masculine style of hat and oxfords everything about this is very tailored and Manish as they would call it in the era so I don't have to make Grand leaps in styling here but I do still need to break down every single element of this project in order to know what I'm doing because I need to order Fabric and supplies figure out if I have enough time to do everything come up with that good better best system that I've talked about before so I'm going to take you through that entire process show you the mock-ups that I have done as well as going over the supplies that I end up finding so this is going to be an in-depth look at how I actually plan out projects of this size before the next few videos will break into making all of the different parts and the final reveal so since we're doing something a little bit different today I'm going to take you upstairs to my Sewing Studio so we can get to breaking down all of the different elements to this one Ensemble first things first I have a lot of pieces I need to figure out and that means I need to have a really good plan in place for how I'm going to go about this I'm going to be using the same paper doll method that I used for my capsule wardrobe because there are a lot of layers to this outfit so this allows me to go through each piece individually and figure out what I need to know about it starting off with the shirt the shirt in the case of a zero fails original outfits is blue in the vast majority of the modern part of the series however he does also have a white shirt in the 1860s scene so it does mean that we're not tied to exactly one color that is great because a lot of the shirts that I was looking at had a contrasting white collar and cuff to a stripe or otherwise slightly colored shirt so I'm not sure if I'm going to go with a blue or a stripe or a light gray but it will probably be a slightly contrasting shirt style I think next up we have the Knickerbockers I don't know what fabric I want to use for these yet because obviously there's no example that he's wearing so for now I'm just going to assume they're going to be the same fabric and the same color as that rage tone that his trousers are in both sets of images I don't want to do the really giant Bloomers I don't want to go to the more extreme I think I'm trying a little more 1897 1898 with this than 1894.5 so I'm going to stick with the snugger Knickerbocker style because I think that's also going to be much more likely to be used in my own wardrobe at some point in time this is going to be a relatively simple style because it's going to be entirely covered up by the skirt I am relatively sure that I am going to do a divided skirt for this just because I want to take that challenge on Beyond just a regular skirt I did however realize there is going to be one big challenge with this since this is going over the Knickerbockers that means that I have to make it large enough to go over them in terms of the waistband size and if I choose to wear this skirt without that bulk underneath or a bulky sweater tucked in or something like that it might be a little bit too big so I'm going to try and find a way to make it adjustable then we have the waistcoat which in the case of ozura fail is a single breasted velvet I wasn't seeing all that many single breasted waistcoats for women's garments in the 1890s unless they were really high cut I didn't like that style as much but I did really like the lower cut shawl collar style that happened to be double-breasted so I think that's what I'm going to go with but I can perhaps amend that if I end up not having enough Fabric or if when I do the mock-up it doesn't look quite right then we have the coat this is something that is I think if anything one of the more iconic parts of a zero fails outfit he has a long Ivory colored wool coat and this is the thing that he's sort of carried over from the 1860s forward so I knew that I didn't want to do something dramatically different I'm going to keep the same style of lapel I think I'm going to go with the longer length I saw plenty of both short and long jackets when it came to Bicycle ensembles so I think for now I'm gonna go with that longer length I might change my mind when I get the whole thing together I'm worried that it's going to be a little overwhelming with that much fabric going on but we'll see the other really iconic piece of his Ensemble is of course the Thai bow tie whatever it is he has for neck wear this might be a challenge in terms of finding fabric it's a relatively simple piece though so as long as I find something that I think matches with the Ensemble I'm going to go with the same either larger width tie or cravat style that seems to be really common on most of the imagery that I was seeing for this era we also have to deal with the below the knee portion well I know that bicycle boots are a thing they also talk about the fact that they go out of style really fast so I found plenty of articles that said that they were leaving those off and more and more women were going to just plain oxfords and then putting spots over them if they needed it for weather purposes so I'm not entirely decided what I'm going to do I do know I'm not making bicycle boots for this particular Ensemble don't think I have the time or the mental space for it so it's probably going to be a pair of oxfords or a pair of shorter style boots like zero Veil is wearing something laced up just above the ankle which means that I need some sort of leg wear there which will either be stockings that I will purchase or spots that I will make ideally I find good stockings for this because the spots are going to cover up the shoes and then what's the point of putting all the effort into the shoes so I'm hoping to find a good pair of stockings I also have to go all the way back up to the top to figure out the hat that is actually one of the bigger questions for me they talk a lot about this particular style of hat that seems to be incredibly popular with bicycle and other sporting or what they call Manish attire and it is essentially a man's hat it's not far off from what we in modern day call a derby hat and some of the references actually even talk about Alpine hats or other things that are similar to what we think of as the traditional Bavarian style so clearly that was one of the options they also have some flat caps and a variety of other things so I think a lot of this is going to come down to what I can find as is all of this so this is where I want to talk about the good better best system I have mentioned it before but I've never really gone over it in great detail so where I can cut corners is frankly not that many places I don't have a lot of trim or decorations or busy work in a way with most of this what I can do however is one do stockings instead of spats a beige pair of socks is not the end of the world for that the next up I can make sure that I'm not over tailoring any of these pieces xerophile's coat is rather lightweight and loose there is no reason for me to do a crazy amount of layering up in terms of infrastructures that's going to take a lot of time versus just one layer of interfacing so that is definitely going to be a time cut that I don't think I'm losing anything on next up I can definitely make a shortcut on the hat this is something that would be ideal for me to get a hat block that's exactly what I'm looking for custom made for me ordered way in advance because that takes a few months make up the hat from scratch out of just the right supplies it's not gonna happen this is the first place that I'm cutting really steeply there are modern hats that are not that far off so I'm going to look for a Ivory beige color Derby hat instead of trying to make something from scratch the next place that I might have to cut this is definitely a good versus best option is the shoes I don't want to have to cut those I really want to make a good pair of tan oxfords or boots the big time crunch there though is the fact that I have to make a pair of last for this I don't have a mid-1890s style last the lower heel and the long pointed toe I have to account a whole week for making last at least if my health permits it so that might be the thing that ends up getting cut because I do have a not historical but very modern pair of tan oxfords with a long pointed toe and a low heel that I think I've had for over 10 years at this point in time but they would do they would be not distracting so if it comes down to it that is going to be my big cut because that saves me potentially two or more weeks and a lot of stress so that is my big thing that I might have to we'll see when we get closer that also means that I have to schedule myself out so that way that is the last thing that I am doing which is fine nothing else depends on it the rest of the clothing however depends on the layers to be built up as they need to be the Knickerbockers first so that way the skirt can be fit over those and then the waistcoat can be fit over that waist bulk and then the coat can be fit over the waistcoat bulk so I need to do them in that order the shirt I'm going to wait on because it's something I can do with a commercial pattern there are some good commercial patterns for that out there I can make that super fast if I absolutely need to that is a sit down and really focus for one day so that's my good system on that is buying a pattern and Hyper focusing for a day to get that done because I don't need it for fitting so that will be the last thing that gets done along with these shoes and I'm sure cutting on the hat I think this might work so next up I need to find patterns to draft for all of these thankfully there are so many patterns for this type of garment in tailoring drafting manuals throughout the 1890s and into the early 1900s they have great examples of bloomers and Knickerbockers of different types of skirts that were meant for walking or for bicycling or for rainy days as one puts it so there are a lot of great examples for every single part of this thank goodness so I'm going to get started on drafting and making mock-ups I don't normally make mock-ups but some of these pieces are a little bit challenging in their fit and some of them I'm not entirely sure on style more importantly I think I'm going to end up with a lot of really expensive and rare fabrics for this so so I want to make sure that I am not adding any inches that I don't have to so that way I don't have to buy any more yards so we're going to start there I'm going to be going into far more detail with each one of the garments in terms of their patterning and fitting when I get to their construction videos but for right now have this little time lapse video of me drafting out the coat oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] we have the first round of parts I have Knickerbockers and the waistcoat they're pretty close to being correct the Knickerbockers are far too long so I'm going to take a couple inches off the pattern super easy to do I also have noticed that they're a little short in the crotch I can't quite get them up to the waist point in front so I'm going to be dropping out that crop seam about an inch I'm doing that instead of adding to the top because the hips are in the right place and everything else seems to fit really well so I think that makes more sense to raise the whole thing than to lengthen it more I also know that I'm going to need a little bit of change in the back there's too much of the baggy bit um but I'm not gonna do a big difference on that on the pattern I'd rather keep changing that on the actual garment so I'm going to save that for the main thing waistcoat is good to go I had to draw out the neckline which I think is pretty close to where I want it to be and I it will have a shawl collar and be double-breasted but the double breasted her will just be a chunk of this flipped over so I don't need to pattern a separate part for that the neckline will be pretty easy to deal with for the collar so the main thing is it fits of course the coat the coat can only goes so far until I have all of the layers underneath to double check the mock-up but I did have to adjust the shoulders I found that there were a lot of pull lines running from the back of my neck down underneath my arm so I shifted the shoulders outwards they fit much better and much smoother now still a little snug up under the arms but that is fixable in its more final format especially since this will be clipped and all of that um that also moving those things outward helped to tighten up the lapel line so that way it's not gapping in front so that was the big shift that had to happen there I'm not 100 convinced on the longer length nor am I 100 convinced on my fullness of skirt I pinned in one side it's still feeling a little full but I think I'll keep fidgeting with that sleeve is pretty good I think I'm gonna add a little bit more fullness up to the top a little bit of height a little bit of width it's pretty good in the arm I don't want it super tight I want a looser fit more coat-like so that's pretty comfortable in width I just want a little bit more puff on top the collar was added after the shoulders were adjusted lapels I think will be just a smidge wider about half an inch or so wider just to make sure that it gets that angel wing feeling that the designer talked about the collar up on top is pretty long and large for that reason so I think though it's a good fit to start and I just need to figure out how much I can trim off so I don't waste any of my fabric all right I have a lot of stuff to update on I have received most of the things that I have ordered and I think there are still a few things I need to find but I haven't really fully decided I'm done the right things so we're going to start off with the very first things that I ordered which were the wools for the jacket and for the divided skirt I found the jacket wool pretty much immediately I am absolutely in love with this I got it from the historical fabric store it is a lovely wool Tweed they have so many great wool Tweeds available there and this is the exact color and texture that I needed the right weight as well it's pretty lightweight I also ordered a wool from them for the divided skirt that unfortunately is a little too Brown it didn't really look terribly different online I think I was just hoping it would come in a smidge more on the dull side so I made a mistake on that one this will get used for something else very soon because it is an absolutely beautiful brown so it's not the end of the world that this isn't working out but it did mean that I had to do a lot more research and what I ended up with was this wool which is just a little bit more on that gray side it has the same sort of flannly Tweety softness a bit of a mixture of tones unfortunately it was really expensive so I only ordered two yards of this even though really for a large divided skirt you should probably have more like four but um yeah look forward to next week's video for the discussion on that problem the nice thing though was that in the process of going back and forth on what sort of wool I wanted for the divided skirt I realized after I had ordered that round that I honestly didn't want the divided skirt and the Knickerbockers to be out of the same fabric one because the brown that came in the Tweed was a little bit on the heavier side and having two full layers of that seemed like a lot I was also doing a lot more research and was finding that they talked a lot about silk as an option or lighter weight wools and I had fallen in love with this image and I really love the fact that they had plaid Knickerbockers so I dug through my collection and this fabric that I had gotten from Burnley and Trowbridge how did I forget that I had this but it feels incredibly lightweight it's gonna do really well underneath a little bit of pop of color and pattern interest but it won't be the main deal with that I was at that point that I also came across my miracle which I feel the irony of saying that considering cosplaying an Angel um which is this pair of stockings which are actually antiques Fab gabs actually just as I was beginning to realize that I wasn't going to find modern stockings that had the correct little plaid style to them in this sort of color range happened to put up a whole big lot of antique stockings and it could not be more perfect it matches the gray wool pretty much exactly and has a little bit of golden texture to it and it does have the green up on top but I feel like that's kind of a fun little accent if anything so that took care of a lot of the major stuff to start I also knew that I needed a velvet for the waistcoat there's the color that he has in the vast majority of the episode with very worn down sort of mousy brown color and then the 1860s roughly is a lot more gold and I originally ordered an antique silk velvet that on the screen looked way more gray but when it came in it was very cold this is really bright it's beautiful um and it does kind of resemble the one that he has in the 1860s but it's just really bright it felt like a little much I think this is going to be perfect as an accent on some things in the future so for right now I'm putting that to the side and I ended up ordering from the same place a different silk velvet that uh is that mousier color so I should have enough of this barely I have a yard and a half of this very narrow stuff so we're gonna see how that goes there will probably be some piecing in my future then I knew I needed shirt Fabric and I have two options that I ordered for that I'm not convinced on either but I think I'm just gonna let my brain take me because they're pretty similar they're both um white with a grayish blue stripe through them this one just is a lot more white this one's got a lot more stripe but this one's also like softer this is silk and cotton and this is just cotton shirting so it might come down less so to the patterning color and more to the texture that I need to work with for this shirt I will definitely be doing the collar and cuffs out of a plain white stiffer thing but we'll see we'll see which one I end up liking better in the end then I also needed shoes I might not have time for the shoes but I at least need to have the fabric just in case took me forever to find a silk that was anywhere near this color I ended up with this one from Renaissance Fabrics which isn't exactly what I was looking for I wanted something let's hair darker I also was really hoping to find something that was a pattern for okay but that just I spent way too much time doing that um this is what I ended up with as an alternative I also have leather which is lighter than I want it to be but that's okay because that actually allows me to stain it a little bit darker to get exactly the tone that I need so I know the shoes are going to take a long time if I can get to them the other things that I need to figure out were the more the accessories the cravat actually has turned out to be the most difficult thing shockingly enough I have had so much trouble finding plaid silks that aren't super heavy weight like big taffeta or dupiani or something like that I originally ordered from the place that I normally get silk for ties from neither of these work this is more like a woven silk it doesn't really work as the type of tie that I need it to it's not outside of the color range but it's just it doesn't do anything and then this one is just way too peachy so that didn't work I do however from Gonzo's efforts that failed have this silk which is a really lightweight tavada so it's still not ideal and it's not a plaid I really did want a plaid but in a worst case scenario it is the right color range which then brings me down to the last thing that took a bit of time I still have to do a little bit of work to this but that I found a hat and it is not too bad it looks really simply on me without a lot of hair I bought a size smaller than I actually am to hope that it's not as overwhelming but I think with the hair the wig and everything it should be okay I might do a little bit of reshaping to it I do know I'm going to take this ribbon and this feather off and replace it with a darker one and maybe a bigger feather so it will at least get a little bit of alteration but it is a worst case scenario already taken care of like it's not a big deal I do also have a wig coming that has not arrived yet so that is one of the things I am still missing I don't think there's much else that I'm going to need I figure I'm going to be using the glazed Cottons for a lot of the things like the back of the waistcoat and the pocketing on the skirts and things like that so I'm good on that regard I might want a separate lining for the jacket I haven't decided yet so I'm thinking I'm just gonna go find like a really lightweight silk satin twill something that's hopefully not too expensive maybe even a rayon so that way it's less expensive because I've already put a lot into this oh pick a major project every six months is kind of my standard issue for this and all of the things that I'm making quite honestly I'm going to wear separately outside of this costume so I don't feel too bad so I guess that's where I leave you today and when I come back in two weeks it will be the Knickerbockers and the divided skirt that I will be tackling at that point in time so I better get back to work because I have a lot of sewing to do

Channel: Nicole Rudolph

Views: 68,597

Keywords: nicole rudolph, fashion history, history myths, weird history, explainer videos, fashion analysis, fashion evolution, busting myths, historical fashion, historical costuming

Id: RyAv7DU0ITE

Length: 30min 25sec (1825 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023