From H&M to Horse Shoe Village (Working on Forgotten Part II)
This week, while we get ever closer to Armistice Day I am dedicating another post to my work on Daniel York Loh’s powerful play, Forgotten which is still on at the Arcola Theatre until the 17th November remembering the Chinese Labour Corps. As this was a period piece on a tight budget, it required a lot of distressing, altering and dyeing of modern clothes to turn them into pieces that fit into the world of early 20th Century China and France. In this blog I’m going to go through the step by step process I took turning one jacket from H&M into one worn by Eunuch Lin while he is still living in Horse Shoe Village in Shandong, China.
The jacket was a cream padded jacket with a rope tie around that I’d actually purchased for Kiln Theatre’s A colOURful World to fit into the desert world that was in the opening of that show. The shape and fit of the jacket was a perfect fit moving into the world of Forgotten and Emma thought it was a good match to her design for the show. So, to begin the process we obviously tried the jacket on the actor, Zachary Hing. In Emma’s designs Eunuch Lin’s jacket is sleeveless so it was important in Zachary’s fitting to know where to cut off the sleeves of the jacket and also where to crop the bottom of the jacket to, to remove the binding that just looked too modern to work in the early 20th Century setting. So this is where I started when I got the jacket home after the fitting, cutting off the sleeves and the bottom of the jacket to give it a more appropriate shape to align with Emma’s design.
After this, I had to remove the snap fastenings in case it came open onstage with Zachary’s movement, so as not to reveal its more modern origins. Another thing I did to hide this was removing and then sewing up the pockets in the jacket. The kind of pocket, again, was not appropriate for the time period so needed to be hidden. The final touch for removing any traces of modernity was removing the belt loops as well.
I had noticed after removing the sleeves and bottom of the jacket that this exposed the padding inside the jacket, so quickly whizzed the edges through my sewing machine just to secure the padding in better but we wanted to maintain the look of the rougher edge on the jacket as it did not make sense for Eunuch Lin to have an incredibly well kempt outfit as he is one of the poor characters so would not have the money for mending his clothes. This completed the first step of me working on the jacket, the next step was dyeing!
The colour Emma wanted for the jacket was a natural red. Emma’s inspiration for the design came from the character of Cuiqiao from the 1984 Chinese drama, Yellow Earth, so this is the colour I was trying to match with my dyeing. I used some industrial Dylon in a dull red. I dipped it into the sink of warm water mixed with the dye for about half an hour ensuring the dye covered the entire jacket. After putting it through a gentle wash in the machine it was a very vibrant red but this died down a lot as it dried to the perfect colour. It still, however, looked quite pristine. To combat this I used some spare red fabric I had to create patches on the jacket to further suggest the jacket being tatty and needing mending.
The final touches to really perfect the jacket was adding dirt and destroying it a little. So, I started with the costume supervisor’s favourite tool, the cheese grater. I grated along the rough edges of the jacket and around the collar and down the front where the jacket would get the most wear and tear. On top of this I then added some black spray paint to give a dirt effect to the jacket. This gave the perfect final touch and just really helped the jacket finally look just right and fit in with the rest of peasant clothing worn by the others in Horse Shoe Village.
This particular item was probably the one that I edited the most in preparation for the show, I think it worked out well and I was really happy with how it looked onstage and I was really pleased with how close I was able to get to Emma’s design. The costumes all required a little bit of attention similar to this but none required quite so much, but make sure you check out the really important show at the Arcola Theatre before the 17th November! If you want to know more about the general process of creating the costumes for Forgotten check out Working on Forgotten Part I which I posted a couple of weeks ago.
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