Belle's village dress
October 2017 - April 2018
based on Belle's costume
in the movie "Beauty and the Beast"
This project is a recreation of Belle’s village dress from the movie Beauty and the Beast. I loved the costumes of this movie, especially this one since it has a lot of different fabrics and textures, and is made out of 13 different pieces. Therefore, the main challenge of this costume was finding the right fabrics, it took me more than six months and a lot of different stores to collect them all. This is the reason why it took me so long to complete this project, since I started it in October 2017 but only got to finish it completely in April the next year.
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my fabric overview
Walt Disney Pictures
For the base pattern I used an online pattern that I transformed until it looked as closely to the movie version as I could. I also added a lot of details that the original pattern didn’t have. The jacket wasn’t included in the pattern but it looks a lot like a 18th century jacket. So I used a 18th century jacket pattern as a base and I used a different pattern for the sleeves, both from Janet Arnold’s “patterns of fashion”.
Janet Arnold’s “patterns of fashion”
Janet Arnold’s “patterns of fashion”
The jacket is also constructed in a way that it can be turned inside out, since Belle wears 2 different jackets in the movie, so one side is blue and the other beige with a flower print.
the blue side of the jacket
the flower printed side of the jacket
The dress is made out of a lot of different fabrics and a lot of different prints, so I tried to find something as closely to the original as possible but I had to use my imagination for some parts. For the pants, I couldn’t find anything that looked a little like the original, so I decided to paint the print on the fabric myself, using a potato.
my finished pants, after a few hours of painting a potato blue over and over again...
potato stamp
In the movie, Belle wears three different hairstyles with this dress and I wanted to recreate them all. For the first two I only needed a blue ribbon that she ties in a bow in her hair. But for the last one I had to make a blue diadem from scratch. Belle also wears a necklace so i recreated that using some ribbon and beads.
photo shoot in the village
