While I'd done Halloween costumes before, they were often just Found Costumes—costumes that piece together store-bought items, often on-the-cheap and/or last-minute to create a costume (a practice I still do often). But, if I was going to try out—really try out—cosplaying from scratch, I was going to do it. Go big or go home, right?
Well, a costume I always thought would be fun to do was my favorite Disney character.
I love Fantasia; I think the music and imagery is beautiful and, of all the gorgeous characters in that film, this centaur in particular always stuck in my head. Admittedly, there's nothing all that special about her. In the 1990's VHS copy I owned at the time, there was nothing particularly special about her. She didn't look or act in any way that really made her stand out from all the other centaurettes prancing about that Bacchanalian vignette.
It wasn't until I was much older that I discovered exactly what made her special. Mind you, the VHS version I owned was the re-edited copy where the extremely racist depictions were taken out of the film—to everyone's (worth listening to, at any rate) enjoyment.
I was horrified. Here is my favorite Disney character—the character my young mind gravitated to and admired so—and she's being serviced by this horribly racist cultural stereotype!
This could not stand.
I was taking her back.
I was taking this beautiful, graceful, magnetic character and restoring her to the wonder I'd felt as a child, before I knew her dark secret of why her hooves shined so bright.
The question was how.
Like I said, I'd never really done cosplaying before. My most complicated costume to date was tying a bunch of yarn to some blocks of Styrofoam and calling it a marionette (a pretty good homemade costume for a week before Halloween, I think). That's a far cry from figuring out how to tack on two more legs and a tail.
So I started out with the body of my horse-half. Which was formed from a discount trash bin for the torso, leftover packing foam to pad me against the sharp plastic edge, a wig for the tail, and miscellaneous plumbing bits to hold the tail in and to form the hips where the legs with attach.
Then came the skeleton of the legs. Made up of even more various plumbing bits and wrapped up in duct tape and cut-up re-useable cloth shopping bags. All held together with wire, duct tape, and hope. But, look, bendy joints!
Then I covered the legs in pillow casing and stuffed them like morbid sausages with pillow filling.
You have no idea the odd looks I got while working on this on the bus and in the office. I looked like a serial killer Dr. Frankenstein.
The legs were measured and modeled after my own legs so, when I put it on, it looks as much like one cohesive piece as possible.
Then it was more pillow bits sausage stuffing to put everything together. Before being nicely covered with sweatpants/sweatshirt pieces. Held all together with screwed-in belts which went around my hips so the whole piece could roll around behind me. By the way, this color velour tracksuit is apparently ridiculously and thankfully popular. I had to buy two pairs of pants (for the back and front legs) and two sweatshirts (for the torso) at the thrift shop and this was the only color that had enough items to cover that amount of material.
To finish off the costume, I took a "flesh-tone" strapless bra. Which, if you're a woman of color, you know isn't actually your skin tone. So I covered it in pantyhose, to give it a darker color that much more closely matched my flesh-tone. Added more panty-hose material to go around my arms to create the wrap-around garland my Centaurette wore. And covered all that with fabric flowers and leaves.
If you look closely, you'll see that in order to make it so my horse half rolled nicely behind me—as opposed to dragging like a corpse behind me—I had to add a harness with straps that went around my shoulders and hooked onto the belts like suspenders. Those were then attached to a woven cord of clear plastic that was drilled into the body's base, right above the tail.It wasn't perfect—and lord knows it made going up and down stairs a challenge—but, it created a quite realistic effect. To the point where people at the CON came up to me, thinking that I was two people with someone else cosplaying as my lower half.
This was, by far, my most challenging piece of costuming that I have ever done. It took something like six months of planning, shopping, MacGyvering, trial-and-erroring, ripping it apart, and putting it back together again before I finished it. There were many, many, many times where I tossed it down and never wanted to look at it again. Only to be struck by inspiration and insanity, working at it almost non-stop.
It was a crazy, fun first step into a hobby and world that I now love. I will forever be so proud of it. I swear that I will find another event to wear it to someday! And, I can sufficiently say that, yes, I took her back; whatever she was in her past, I can feel her wonder again.
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