Oh! And… More Leeloo

I’ve noticed that there are many people coming here to see my Leeloo costume. Perhaps its creation as well as me wearing it and dancing the Cancan in it, I dunno.

Well, I’ve decided to make a series of posts about it. I didn’t take pictures when I built it. In retrospect, I should’ve. I had no idea it’d be such an ambitious undertaking. One I’d do again, but not so enthusiastically because that dress practically owned me for a month and a half. It was totally worth it, but it was also a lot of work.

From design to finished product, it wasn’t a picnic. First came the screen shots to see what Leeloo was actually wearing and what her hair looked like with those long, weird, gummed-up, not-traffic-cone-orange, just-bright-orange twists. The hardest part was seeing what her shoes looked like. The only times her shoes were onscreen where when she was kicking ass and most of the freeze frames were too blurry to make out the detail on her shoes. Granted, I was doing a different rendition of her costume, so I could vary a little, but I wanted a good base to start with.

It was a combined effort between me and Shawn Crosby. He did a wonderful drawing of the design. I have it somewhere. I’ll post it if I can find it.

In the end, the costume cost me hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours. I really stepped up to the plate on this one and I’m amazed that it turned out like it did. I’d never worked with vinyl or stretch netting or even some simpler things like snaps and interfacing and decorative elastic and iron-on bonding. Okay, so some of those things aren’t as common, but you get the picture. This wasn’t an easy job, but I did learn a lot. Not only did I learn how to physically do stuff, I learned something more important: That I could do just about anything I set my mind to…yes, just about anything.

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