From Page to Stage: Betsy and Vasily
In the blog this week I’m exploring a slightly more personal costume. We’re returning to my favourite show I’ve designed so far, The Fruits of Enlightenment by Lev Tolstoy and I’ll be looking at a character that I played! It was during my degree and was part of a module where each student has an onstage and backstage role so I costume designed the show but also had an acting role in it, alongside the incredibly talented and lovely, Katie Wood, who played my sister in the show. It seemed near impossible to do a post about one of the siblings without talking about both of them so I thought I would combine my discussion on Betsy and Vasily.
I knew the characters would need to be intertwined from the beginning of designing them so I designed them almost in conjunction with one another. To understand the world in which the two of them come from I looked to the cast of Made in Chelsea and Gossip Girl. Both of them are decadent and immature with more money than they know what to do with and it was important their looks looked designer made. I noticed with the females of MIC and Gossip Girl, most of them wore top and skirt combos rather than a decadent designer dress like the designs I was looking at for the older characters like the Mistress. For Betsy, I was particularly inspired by a floral bralet and skirt combo by Maison Lilly and Billy, which also lead me to a floral pattern for the both of them. I thought florals were particularly fitting for the two of them as they are delicate (underneath all the fake confidence I saw the characters as quite insecure) and the patterns draws a lot of attention to them onstage as well, when most other characters were in block colours, as they often tried to make any scene they were about themselves. With Vasily I was particularly inspired by a suit by Alexander McQueen that featured a repeating pattern of butterflies across it, as well as a suit that the fashion haus did for one of the background characters of the Capitol in The Hunger Games, which featured a pale blue floral pattern. Although, for Vasily I felt that the suit was maybe too outdoors and formal for his everyday wear, I noticed how many of the men in Made in Chelsea only wore their suits to formal occasions and were surprisingly casual in their everyday outfits but still looked chic and designer, so I opted for a patterned shirt and white jeans to continue the “rich boy” aesthetic. I added a floral brooch to his chest as well; inspired by an outfit RuPaul Charles wore in one of his episodes of Drag Race. I also wanted to give the two of them matching floral necklaces in my initial designs as I really wanted there to be a commonality between them onstage.
With regards to colour I began looking at putting the two of them in varying shades of pink. I had already designed the Master and Mistress, their parents, in red and thought pink would be a nice nod towards their parents, with pink being a derivate of red. However, upon researching the best colours for different skin tones and testing different colours on Katie’s skin tone in particular I found blue was a much better match. With Katie’s complexion, pink would have washed her out onstage which would not have been ideal so I moved more towards keeping within the realm of pastel colours as this seemed fashionable among the Made in Chelsea cast in particular, as well as on the runways I was looking at, especially a particular 2016 look from Versace. Moving into blues also worked well for Vasily’s outfit.
Moving to hair and make-up, I was again working alongside Angie Peña-Arenas to design the make-up looks. In our research we found two great images on Pinterest that I felt really worked for Betsy and Vasily. A strong triangle just above the eye, that we moved slightly higher up to slightly block out the eyebrows to add an element of oddness to their make-up and a slight accent in the cupid’s bow in a bright colour on top of a bold, contrasting lip colour. We decided that they should have the same make-up as each other but reversed colour-wise for each of them. We went with blue to go with their outfits, which became UV make-up when that was introduced to the process, and gold as this was featured in the make-up of the Master and Mistress and so gave them both an element of status within the house. With their hair I gave them both a large, dramatic victory roll at the front of both their hair, this gave them a dramatic look and brought another link between the two of them. This was also inspired by the look from the ‘Capitol man’ in The Hunger Games that I found the beautiful floral suit on.
On to making the looks a reality: I was really lucky in looking for Betsy’s outfit in finding a perfect pale blue skirt online, shortly followed by a pale blue bodicon dress with white lace, floral trim. I thought these to items were exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I cut the bodicon dress in half and hemmed the top half to turn it into a bralet with white floral lace sleeves. Finally I found a pair of glittery pink/red shoes in the UEA costume store that went with the rest of the outfit and managed to maintain the red link between her and her parents. Finally I was able to finish her look with a pearl and flower necklace I also found in the costume store that further gave a subtle nod to her mother, with her pearl necklace and pearls on her face. With Vasily, I managed to stumble across a beautiful blue shirt in a charity shop with a wonderful white floral pattern on it and paired it with some perfect white super skinny jeans, there were then some perfect white almost cowboy style heeled boots in the costume store that fit perfectly with the outfit and with Vasily’s character. To add a final touch and a little nod to Betsy I constructed a flower brooch to attach to his shirt out of the left over material and lace from the dress I had cut for Betsy’s top. When going outdoors in one of the scenes, I also wanted them both to have an over-the-top fur coat, to link them to their Russian roots, after all it is a Russian play, as well as just generally show off their decadence. For Betsy, one of the other cast members had a beautiful green-blue faux fur jacket that worked perfectly and for Vasily, I found a pale cream faux fur jacket in the Maddermarket Theatre costume store.
I was really happy with both of their final looks and think they worked really well onstage and fitted the characters perfectly.
To see more about the inspirations for these looks check out my Pinterest boards:
Betsy: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/kylechrisflynn/fruits-betsy/
Vasily: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/kylechrisflynn/fruits-vasily-and-peterishchev/
To see more photos of The Fruits of Enlightenment check out my Galleries page
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