Hello lovelies,

last year I attended Dokomi and its theme was retro. Of course Lady Oscar jumped into my mind immediately.
I am not the Oscar type and therefore chose to do a Marie-Antoinette cosplay. Ryoko Ikeda made some wonderful illustrations but to be honest, historically wise they are more fantasy and Victorian than 18th century. Therefore I decided to combine the cosplay and the rococo form and make it a bit more historically accurate.





As for the fabric I didn't want to go with expensive silk or satin because it was a cosplay after all and for the robe I went with a pink polyester satin-like fabric. It was actually lovely to work with because it didn't fray that much and the pleats looked very full.

I did not have a lot of time on my hands for that costume (a month, every day after work) and it misses a lot of frills I wanted to add. I am not sure when and if I will wear this costume again but given the opportunity I will definitely try and add more decorations and frills and pearls and all of the good stuff.

Once again I used the JP Ryan pattern with slight alterations: I made the shoulder straps separately and finished them in the historical way. A few of the long seams were made with the machine, all of the visible seams are of course hand made.

I started with the stomacher. For my Elsa cosplay I used stiff fabric to get the desired stiffness, this stomacher was made with sturdy lining and reed boning.





The skirt is pink polyester and definitely not the nicest fabric but it served the purpose. I see the making of both of my cosplays, Elsa and Marie-Antoinette as training for a bigger project: a robe a la francaise made out of real silk and hand made bobbin lace.


I used different kind of techniques for this, and I especially grew found of the rolled whip gather, as seen on the picture above. It was the 18th century way of gathering everything. For this you just whip gather (I always use an extra strong thread because the normal sewing threads snap at the pressure) about 5-10cm of your fabric and then pull, and then gather and pull again. That's all.


I decided to go with his plainer skirt design. It at least looks similar to the third Marie-Antoinette picture from the top.

 I hand stitched everything to the skirt because the sewing machine would have been too obvious.

Next was the actual robe, the lining was made out of 100% light cotton.


The pink fabric was pinned on top but not flatlined, because that would have been more Victorian.

This is how the whole back looks like.

 One of my most favourite parts of doing the robe is pleating the back. I think this is the most elegant feature about it.











First fitting:


I finally wore the pictures at the convention. There was an adjourning park and M. made a few pictures of me.





I edited all of the above pictures, it seems like I have a kind of red phase.

Only the picture below was edited by another person, namely Eva Hime/Hane Iro. She also added the flowers and made it ethereal.

All the best,

Auris Lothol