I was inspired and decided to draw an OC of mine (Original Character) in a masquerade dress. The only problem was that I didn’t have a dress design to use.
This led to some brainstorming and eventually I settled on a mix of Tudor, Renaissance and Regency style, particularly of English and French influence.
It was only after sketching a few key features that I looked up some stained glass window designs, hoping for inspiration, when I saw a picture of Notre Dame’s rose windows and then looked at the ruff on one of the designs. Suddenly, my dress had a theme.
As far as style goes, I picks bits of different eras to make the design. It is not so much historically accurate as historically inspired. I’d imagine it looks like an Opera dress.
The ruff and bodice is a more English Tudor style, especially the shape of the neckline and ruffs being one of the heights of fashion, as you might find in portraits of Queen Elizabeth the First. The ruff would have the look of the rose windows, as stated above, but not to that extent of detail because there is only so much I can manage. The neckline also drew inspiration from one of the roof shapes, from the side of the cathedral, the two spires on either side framing the neckline as well as provide helpful seam/panel lines for the bodice.
The sleeves, gloves and shawl are actually more of a Regency era influence, because the usual sleeves for such a dress would be either the signature Tudor slitted sleeve or bigger, billowy fantasy sleeves gathered at the elbow and then fitted to the wrist. However I didn’t want to obscure the ruff or skirt with such sleeves and so changed the sleeves to a shorter length. This happened to look like Regency style sleeves so I added the gloves and shawl. (Also, I figured the dress would be rather warm and uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time so having something to help control temperature might be nice)
Firmly in the Notre Dame theme, I was wondering what to do with the shawl and originally decided it could be grey and shaped to mimic the statue wings. But then, I saw a picture of the interior and thought, “the architecture is amazing. Someone had to have put so much time and effort to make those arches and support columns work but look so beautiful.” And then realised, “those two arches almost look like some fabric someone had draped over their arms like a shawl. The columns could also be other parts of fabric to weight it down and hold it’s shape.”
So that was my thought process with the shawl design, which unexpectedly became my favourite part of the outfit.
As far as the skirt is concerned, I knew I wanted it to be an almost bell shape but ended up making just the hips wider to better fit the shape of the main silhouette of the building (Half of those kinds of dresses are closer to architecture than normal clothing anyway). The windows and arches would end up being patterns and details on the fabric of the dress. (Y’know, there’d be space either side of the skirt for some bells in the hidden pockets. Just a thought.)
After this, the next task was trying to figure out the best way to show the dress that isn’t a plain character standing in place like a mannequin. I wanted the character to actually be doing an action, something. So after some consideration (and listening to a bunch of themed music) I decided that the character would be like an Opera singer performing. The dress is almost a costume anyway and even though they were tricky to move in, it still has the capacity to show action and movement- particularly the fabric of the shawl.
The second drawing is a draft of the digital version so that is the next step.