Hey sorry to bother you with this but I’m planning on making a cosplay of the doll from bloodborne and I saw that you made an amazing cosplay of it and I was wondering what fabrics you used/recommend for the dress?
Hi Anon! Firstly thank you for the kind words. :) To answer you: This is a very broad question, but hopefully my answer is helpful.
For most of my costumes, particularly the Doll, I try hard to look at fabrics that aren’t synthetic. This means I start with cottons, linens, wools, and other traditional fabric types that typically wouldn’t be seen in what we can only assume is some time in the 17-1800s. I find that approaching things with a “what would make sense” mindset is what helps me pick out fabrics.
For the Doll, I spent a lot of time looking first at the concept artwork as well as screencaps from the game:
In both of these, you can see that the materials on her are pretty well-worn and definitely have a lot of texture. Based on that, I spent a lot of time with my phone in the fabric store looking at woven fabrics (shout-out to upholstery and furniture fabrics here--that’s where I do most of my shopping). I eventually settled on a combination of what I can only assume is fabric meant for the itchiest couch in the world as well as some woolen suiting fabric meant for jackets.
The big takeaway here is this: Look really carefully at the source material! For the Doll I knew it wouldn’t make sense to use plain brown smooth fabric, so I spent a ton of time hunting for something that emulated that worn-down look.
Good luck!
