Dissecting the Bunny Costume: Price Totals

Time for the Dragon*Con bunny costume totals! You too can dress like a vintage Playboy Bunny Girl on the cheap.

I will admit that this is not the first time I've worn this costume. It made it's debut last year around Halloween 2009. My Besty, Fiance and I decided that this would be a good group costume to wear to party that was being hosted in Atlanta. We found out about it about 2 weeks prior to the event so we had come up with something easy and quick.

Halloween Party in October 2009. Besty Stacey, Fiance, and Nancy (that's moi, with much shorter hair)

For me there are three important rules of costuming.

1. It has to be cute
2. It has to be cheap 
3. People must be able to instantly recognize who or what you are. 

The costume doesn't need to be completely accurate, but people need to "get it." So I always start off with lots of research. You know me by now. I'm a research whore amateur fashion historian. So the first step was to figure out what those Bunny Girls actually wore. Cue slides.

All Images pulled from The Independent

So after looking at waaaaaay too many pictures of scantily clad women I was able to determine the key pieces that really made the "look." I do this with every costume I make, but the bunny costume was easier to dissect than most. First you have the cuffs and collar. Next you have the strapless body suit. After that comes the ears. If you look at the images above you can see that the ears are different in each one. What that told me was that I didn't have to pay too much attention to those. The actual Bunny ears changed style and shape over time so no one would care if mine were a bit off.  The next element was the tail which had to be big. None of these little tiny cotton balls you see in costume shops. As you can see in the photos above the girl's tails were quite sizable. I knew I wouldn't find the tail I wanted in a store so I would need to construct one from scratch.

We had limited time so the best option was to make some pom-poms. Each tail took a whole skein of Caron Simply Soft (acrylic yarn you can snag at any big box craft store). It worked like a charm. The tails were nice and fluffy and thick. The yarn was $2.95 a skein, but for the purposes of this blog we'll round it up to $3.00.

Boy do I look hideous in this picture. Yikes. Stacey looks great though. 

The body suits were made from corsets already in our collections and cheap high waisted panties from Kohl's (about $3.00 each). The bunny ears, cuffs and collar were a set we found on the internet. I splurged here and spent $15 on those. The last steps were to add some black pantyhose (I wore tights for Dragon Con) and some black everyday/office heels that we both had lying around.

Fast forward back to Dragon*Con 2010. Oh yes, I look much better here.

So the Grand Total for the Bunny Costume.

    $15.00 : Ears, Cuffs and Collar
    $3.00   : Bunny Tail (Yarn)
    $3.00   : Black High Waisted Panties
    $4.00   : Black Tights
    $0.00   : Already had Corset
+  $0.00   : Black Work Pumps
    A little under $25.00

Sweet!

Happy costuming. Anyone have some great ideas for Halloween this year? I still haven't decided on costumes for myself and Fiance. If anyone has any suggestions for us let me know!