Les Miserables, 2024

I’ve always loved this show so I was ecstatic about the opportunity to costume it! I’ll admit I may have been a bit obsessed with this show when I was but a young lass in high school. I remember writing the lyrics of Do You Hear the People Sing on my Converse with a sharpie in 10th grade and I thought I was so cool for that. In other words, I have an emotional attachment to Les Miserables and I wanted to put my all into making it happen. With a large cast and just me to sew costumes, it was important to make use of our supply of preexisting costume pieces. I still ended up making a lot of pieces from scratch, but I had to be strategic about which projects would be the most effective for placing the actors in the correct era of fashion history. 

I was very excited to get to work on Fantine. I knew I would be making two similar dresses for her to account for her miserable circumstances. I decided her colors would be pale blue and yellow. We already had a gorgeous chiffon gown that fit the actor perfectly but it was, by my estimation, about 80 years too soon for that style. We kept the gown as the underlayer and I built a more era-appropriate dress to be worn on top. I used pale blue cotton trimmed with a creamy yellow floral that once hung in my mother’s house as drapes. I found myself short on fabric when it came to making the more tattered duplicate so I had to get creative with piecing. “Fallen Fantine’s” dress fit much differently as if she had been tearing and repairing it over and over until the fit had completely changed. I wanted the character to look uncomfortable without making the actor uncomfortable. The haphazard design lines of the tattered dress, as well as the extensive weathering of the fabric, did the trick and I was quite happy with the end result. 

Fantine’s wig-change was another challenge. The actor had beautiful long brown hair though we ended up putting her in a wig. Going from a long wig to a short wig would be much easier than going from no wig to a short wig. It was actually my own wig (from a Tohru Honda cosplay) that we used for Fantine. I styled it myself to try to make it more historically accurate. The bangs had to be hidden and I made a bonnet and stitched it onto the wig itself to keep it in place. We sourced another wig of the same color for her freshly shorn look. 

My most ambitious build in for this show was Adult Cosette’s dress. Cosette is pretty much the only woman we see who isn’t destitute so she was my only opportunity to really place the show into the right decade in terms of fashion history. Men’s silhouettes didn’t change as drastically over the course of the show’s timeline, at least not in ways that the vast majority of non-costume nerds would notice. Cosette would have to be up to date with the latest fashions in order to be perceived as a proper young lady in Paris. It was important to me to be as historically accurate as possible in terms of silhouette. The dress is worn in the 1830s so that means massive sleeves and bell shaped skirts supported by corded petticoats. The polyester chiffon I used was not ideal for the era, but I liked the color and we had enough of it leftover from a project last year that I could make a big poofy dress out of it. I draped the bodice on my dress form using a shiny beige jacquard and overlayed it with pleats of pink chiffon which I handstitched into place. The sleeves are a pale yellow cotton with the pink chiffon overlay, cartridge pleated at the shoulder for maximum volume. I considered making sleeve supports to go underneath, but I didn’t want to overcomplicate the changing process for the actress. Getting in and out of the petticoat and gown was difficult enough as it was. The sleeves looked big enough, if somewhat deflated, so I let it be. 

Eponine is possibly my favorite character in this show. Call me basic but On My Own never fails to bring me to tears. I wanted something to tie together both Young Eponine and her adult counterpart. The actors themselves didn’t look super similar so I wanted to help the audience connect the two. Young Eponine wore an adorable little plum floral dress that we had in our stock. We didn’t have any fabric similar enough to it so I decided to make my own. I dyed some scrap muslin and hand painted flowers all over it with fabric paint to make a simple fichu. I knew I couldn’t exactly recreate the fabric, not with our budget and time constraints, but I wanted Adult Eponine to wear something that could be seen as the tattered scraps of her childhood clothes. I found that I liked the way the muddy purple looked against the drab olive of her skirt (which I made from some other fabric scraps). I also made two identical shirts for her out of tea-stained white muslin. One of them was kept relatively pristine while the other got splattered in blood (a mix of fabric paint, red dye, and coffee grounds) for A Little Fall of Rain (yet another scene that makes me weep uncontrollably). 

For the male characters, I decided that neckwear would be the best way to place them in the proper decade of historical fashion. I made about a dozen stock collars with attached cravats tied in all sorts of different styles. They fastened in the back so they would be easy to take on and off between scenes. Between these and the ambiguously 19th century coats we were able to source, we managed to outfit all of the revolutionaries to my satisfaction. 

The last point I’d like to make is the amount of pieces I made for the ensemble. I stuck to simple patterns and scrap fabric both from BTC’s stash and my own, and cranked out a plethora of shirts, skirts, pockets, and fichus. The chain gang in the opening scene wore simple boxy shirts of tea-stained muslin. I made several bonnets using a pattern from American Duchess, one of my favorite sources for historical patterns. The “lovely ladies” and other destitute women got simple petticoats of tattered fabric bound with bias tape at the waist. I made several pockets to be worn over the skirts. Typically this style of pocket would be worn under the skirt so the hand can slip through the pocket slit of the skirt to reach the pocket underneath. However, I liked the look of the pockets worn over the skirt. Not only were they easier to use, they also contrasted nicely against the skirt fabrics, adding more interest to the overall look. 

I could go on about every little thing I made for this show, but I believe I have successfully covered all of my major design decisions. Once again this show was a dream to work on. It was an honor to be a part of this production and to work with so many talented people.