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!

Dragon Con

So we totally spent a few days at Dragon*Con this weekend. If you don't know what that is it's a HUGE nerd convention that happens every year in Downtown Atlanta. We went for a couple of days. It was way too much fun.

The Convention has tons of panels for nearly every type of Nerd-dom. Most of the panels are grouped into tracks based on topics. There was a Trek Track, a Star Wars Track, a Video Game Track, a Supernatural Track, a Skeptics Track, a Boardgame Track, and the list goes on and on.  I mostly went to the Costuming Track Panels. The classes that I took involved pattern drafting, wig construction, historical costuming, and Burlesque costuming.  Fiance was a Science Track Guy. He did things like go to panels about the recent changes in the classification of objects in our solar system, went to a sun viewing (apparently saw huge solar flares and sunspots), and panels on where the American Space Program is headed.

There were some great retro inspired costumes at the convention. Fiance was the photographer during the convention so all these photos were taken by him.

Retro Space Girl. She was very cute. I'm told that she's posing with someone from the Watchmen. I am ashamed to say that I have never read the comic nor seen the movie so I cannot verify this.

Loved this Lady's cute sailor dress. The guy she was with was sporting the Steampunk look.

Not really sure if these girls are something or whether they just made cute Mardi Gras themed dancer costumes. I loved their feathery headpieces.

This Lady was very my Fair Lady-esque. Gotta love the hat. It seemed larger in person.

Here is the lovely lady who taught the Costuming for Burlesque Panel, Pinky Shear. She is a costumer for Big City Burlesque in Atlanta, GA. Her shoes have over $200 worth of crystal attached to them. This Lady really takes the time to craft her costumes. She was awesome.

Holmes.

Nifty 1910 inspired costume.

This was the retro/throwback portion of the Dragon*Con Parade. I love the A League of Their Own costumes. You can see some of the Pinup girls in the background there too.

And then we stumbled across Jem and Holograms, the Misfits, and Synergy. How cool is that? Totally geeked out over these guys for a while. They were outrageous. Also, is it bad that I'm lusting over their shoes?

I went a little retro myself and sported my interpretation of the old Playboy Bunny girls.

Wooooo. Magical disappearing legs.

Later I got to hang out with Bud Trooper. It was pretty sweet.

We also attended a few of the celebrity panels. The cast of I Dream of Jeannie was there.

Picture blurry, but we were sitting pretty far back and were using a cheap camera. From left to right Host, Barbara Eden (Jeannie), Bill Daily (Major Robert Healy), and Larry Hagman (Major Tony Nelson).

We also went to see Kevin Sorbo's panel (HERCULES!!!), but it was too dark in there to get any good pictures. Fiancé did manage to snap this one of him during the parade.

We also had to stop for a photo opp with Rogue from Cruxshadows. Awesome! He totally touched my shoulder, then gave us each a big hug. I heart the Cruxshadows. Yes we're washed out, but some nice random guy snapped this photo for us so I can't complain.

Another one of the Tracks that was very very popular was the Steampunk Track. The idea behind it is that they take things in the modern world and recreate them as if they were in an alternate reality where steam power is the dominant technology (rather than electricity). Confused yet? Well the Steampunks definitely put some serious effort into their costumes.

Steampunk-ified Super Heroes. Batman on the left, Superman on the right. I think that's the Joker and the Penguin between them. 

Correction! The lovely lady in purple in this photo tells me that she is portraying Catwoman. The lovely lady in the tux is portraying Zatanna. Thanks for the update!

Steampunk Wizard of Oz. This group made my jaw drop. Do you see that Tinman in the back? How many hours of work went into that?! And Glinda! And the wicked witch! And check out the flying monkey with the jet pack next to Dorothy on the ground. Wow. These guys invested some serious time and some serious dough into these.

All and all I had a lot of fun. I'd like to go back next year.