Cinderella Exhibition

Today I went to London with my friend to go to London Dungeons and go shopping in Oxford Street, but when I heard that there was a Cinderella Exhibition, I knew for certain I wanted to go there and needed to squeeze it in my day somewhere. I thought we could term up in Leicester Square Gardens and go in, straight after we got off the coach at 10:20am. However we turned up and went to the box office and was told the next available tickets (which were free, all the ones online had gone, so we could not purchase them until the day you show up) was not till 5pm, which was hours away. At 4pm we had tickets for London Dungeons and I thought that would go on for a couple of hours, so I asked for tickets for 6pm, which was cutting it tight as our coach was leaving London Victoria at 7:30pm.

After we got out of the London Dungeons it was one crazy rush to Leicester Square, we didn't get there till about 6:15pm, and my friend wondered if our tickets would still be valid as we was a little late. When we saw the long queue I began to panic and think I would never get to go in, but after asking a employee who was selling booklets, she informed us that people with tickets go to a much smaller queue, and that the longer queue was for people with no tickets that are willing to wait for a very long time to get in, if I knew this earlier I might of waited in that long queue first thing...

Before going in I bought a brochure with photos and information inside of the exhibition. When we finally got in, we discovered that in every room there was a person that gave an explanation for each room, like a guided tour. I thought at first oh it's going to take forever to go all the way around, but we went around in about 15 to 20 minutes, I would of liked to stay longer to read all the information about the costumes and to examine everything more closely, but we was running out of time, and if I had stayed 10 minutes longer we would have missed our coach.

I took photos of all the costumes, I absolutely love them, and these kind of outfits are what I want to create. I have always loved fantasy/fairy-tale costumes from movies like Mirror Mirror, Hunger Games and now Cinderella, I would like to go into a career designing and making fantasy period inspired costumes. I like that Sandy Powell mixed different periods into her fantasy designs, like she said "the Once Upon A Time period is a mixture of 19th century and 18th century, with a bit of 1940s and 50s thrown in." All the costumes are different and I love that. The fabrics are beautiful and the Swarovski jewels in the fairy godmothers dress are so pretty.

My favourite characters costumes are the Ugly sisters dresses, though I wouldn't call them ugly as they are beautiful! I like the 50s inspired flowery dresses in yellow and pink, and their ball gowns in pink and green, with the print and 3d flowers sewn on are amazing.

Originally for my Final Project I thought I could have the theme as Fantasy Fairy-tale costumes, and I still love that idea, but I chose to do Japanese Fashion. I would like to make my Lolita Japanese Fashion also influenced by the fairy-tale period, maybe with a mix of both themes, so it's still Japanese influenced but is big and flamboyant just like these costumes. I will look at Sandy Powell as a costume designer as well as other fantasy costume designers and put their work in my sketchbook, to also go with the Japanese fashion artists I have in their.

I love Sandy Powell's costume illustrations and when I get that far with my project I might do one in the style of hers. There was a costume design competition on Tumblr for designing a Cinderella dress to then be made, and I entered it with three designs, which are bellow, I loved drawing these designs, however I didn't win as I didn't get enough votes to get into the top 10 to be considered.