Hi there! I made this blog to keep all of my phantom-specific costume resources in one place. I hope it also serves the purpose of being useful to others who are interested in costume making, or putting together their own phantom character cosplay.
⁛ About me ⁛
I am a professional-but-mostly-retired costume maker who specialises in late 19th century European clothing and fashion - hence the interest in phantom. I love Maria Bjørnson's original designs for the phantom musical and am slowly making my way through a series of replicas. I may or may not post about them here.
⁛ Tag system ⁛
Costume pieces are tagged in the format [character name] + [costume piece].
My posts is for sharing my own research or resources.
Stars asks is for when I need help with something!
Stars answers is for answered asks.
The above tag links are mutually exclusive, so if you are looking for something specific that I have written, try checking all three.
Costume research posts is for collecting other people's excellent written research into costume making or cosplay.
Miscellanea is for my unsolicited opinions on other peoples' costume conversations, because I have the social etiquette abilities of a moose on a highway and cannot prevent myself from barging in on costume-related topics in the most inconvenient way possible.
Personal and therefore unlikely to be useful is what it says on the tin - please feel free to filter this one if you would prefer not to read the rare occasions where I ramble and/or whine on this blog about spending too much money on fabric.
Costume evisceration - for posts which feature markedly more criticism than praise. Do filter this one too if you would prefer not to read my scalding critiques of the way some costumes are made.
⁛ Other things ⁛
Please drop by my ask box if you have any costume questions! Let's be friends!
No, I haven't worked on costumes for an official phantom production (I wish!). This is all just a hobby for the love of the game.
Icon is of Dmitri Ermak as the phantom from the Moscow production.
Some observations on gendered clothing items and accessories in the Phantom's wardrobe
Or, why some historical context reveals that quite a bit of it is traditionally womenswear, if you know what to look for. I wonder - was this intentional?
Most of this has been said better and in greater detail by other people, so please check out the reference links throughout this post! More than anything I am making this to compile the various sources in one place.
Onward to some extremely nerdy discussion!
Part 1 - hats
I will start with the easy one! In the musical, the Phantom wears four different hats - the fedora seen in the title song (which also reappears in the All I Ask of You Reprise), the winter officials' hat that goes with the dragon robe, the hat that forms part of the red death costume, and the feathered hat in the mausoleum scene.
Phantom hats galore! One of these is not like the others.
Of those, two are fancy-dress pieces - the winter officals' hat and the red death hat - and, surprisingly, the other two were actually both viewed as womens' headwear in the 1880s. Thank you to @or-what-you-will for giving some excellent detail on that point in this wonderful and very thorough post - I highly recommend giving it a read! I had always wondered if anyone else picked up on the womens' feathered hat detail, and I never knew the origins of the fedora! A surprise Sarah Bernhardt appearance! I love learning new things.
The likeliest explanation that I can come up with for the hat design choices is that none of the typically acceptable formal mens' hats of the era had a particularly wide brim, and were therefore not very useful in the pursuit of hiding one's face. Women, meanwhile, were expected to protect their skin from sun and weather damage, and therefore fashionable womens' hats often had a wider brim. That is just a guess though, so interpret this information as you see fit. One observation I will make is that it seems that the red death costume hat is drawing stylistic influence from the spanish cavalier hat, and as the hat in the mausoleum scene is similar in style, it is possible that was the inspiration there too. But there is nothing in the costume sketches to explain this specifically, and I have not seen it discussed anywhere either, so who knows.
Part 2 - the dragon robe
This is another really beautiful wardrobe piece and such a wonderful choice for communicating character details through costume. Within the world of the story, it is designed to be either an authentic court dress garment from China or an accurate replica of one, the likes of which were available for sale in western Europe as a domestic luxury item.
Qing dynasty court robe - image from Augusta Auctions.
The rank badges, diagonally striped lower border, and dragon motifs are consistent across both mens' and womens' court dress, and variations in colour were related to season, occasion, and rank, rather than gender. But there are two explicitly feminine items of clothing that appear in court dress in China during this era - the cloud collar motif and the fringed tabard - and both of these appear on the Phantom's costume.
Two examples of the dragon robe costume from west end - the left is one made from genuine antique materials for John Owen-Jones, the right is one made from modern replica materials a few years later, for Marcus Lovett. Both clearly show the cloud collar with its stiffened, scalloped edge, and the fact that this costume has a tabard-like construction with fringed trim at the lower hem. Both pictures via operafantomet.
A cursory glance at traditional court costume from China in this era reveals that the tabard-like overgarment seen above, usually with a fringe at the lower hem, was only worn by women. The cloud collar detail, however, is a little more challenging to track down accurate historical details about. I am very grateful to this article which I came across while browsing operafantomet's research into the same topic. In summary of the relevant points of the article - at the time of its origin several centuries earlier, the cloud collar motif appeared on clothing regardless of the gender of the wearer. However, by the Qing dynasty it seemed to have become a merely vestigial ornamentation in China, and was thus relegated to womens' clothing, the fashion for which was slower to change than that of mens' court dress and therefore adhered more closely to the mediaeval design -
"The cloud collar itself did survive for women's robes down into the Ch'ing period, since the women's costume was essentially more conservative: sometimes woven into the robe, more often appliqued, and sometimes detachable. But as this had become merely ornamental by the eighteenth century, with its original significance apparently forgotten, it became to all intents merely a background for trivial ornamentation, and at times even tended to lose its traditional shape."
So, at the time when the phantom story is set, the cloud collar was indeed an exclusively feminine article of clothing.
I then had a look through my copy of Auguste Racinet's Le Costume Historique, which I find to be an invaluable resource for understanding the contemporary european perception of traditional clothing from around the world (ie. it was published in the 1880s, so it shows how people living when phantom is set would have viewed these garments, without any 20th- or 21st- century bias. The caveat being that there is a large amount of dated and sometimes offensive language). These images are from the section on Qing dynasty China -
The image on the left shows a typical mens' robe from this era, complete with the embroidered square badge showing rank and the patterned lower border. I would love to know what the animal on the badge is meant to be! In the image on the right, note that the tabard-like overgarment, and similarly the cloud collar, is only worn by the women.
For completeness' sake, here is another image which shows the difference between mens' summer (left) and winter (right) attire -
The winter hat is also visible here! I am very curious about the capelet-like item on the right - it does not fit the definition of a cloud collar, but I do not know what else it might be and the description from the book is not specific enough to be useful in that regard. Any clues, anyone?
The illustrations from Le Costume Historique clearly support the notion that both the cloud collar and the fringed tabard were specifically female garments, even if the descriptions in the book do not explicate this. Maria Bjørnson clearly knew her stuff, so I will go ahead and assume this was a deliberate choice, which is even more fascinating.
In summary - the Phantom's comfy at-home lounging clothes? Also womenswear.
Part 3 - mourning traditions
With the exception of the red death costume in Masquerade, all of the Phantom's attire and accessories in the musical are black - a choice which strongly evokes the tradition of mourning attire in 19th-century France. The point of this post is not to investigate the why behind this choice (there has been plenty of discussion about that too, all of it interesting, but I will resist the temptation to go into that here or this will never get finished). What is both fascinating and relevant to this post, however, is that mourning attire conventions in western Europe in the late 19th century were both elaborate and strict, and while rules existed for all genders and ages, the extended and extravagant display of grief through clothing accessories that appears in the Phantom's wardrobe was only done by women at the time.
The visual design of the musical really runs with the idea that the Phantom is perpetually in a state of mourning, as evidenced by props and accessories that would also have demonstrated this at the time the story is set. He seems to stick to this behaviour well beyond the permissible extent of the mourning period for men in 1880s France, which would be a fairly bold statement in the story's historical context. As an example, the "notes" sent by the Phantom in the musical all have a black border, which was an expected feature of correspondence sent by someone recently bereaved -
The French word used for this black border is even etymologically related to an antiquated term for a grieving woman (link in German as there is no equivalent English-language article, sorry! Image from operafantomet, as usual)
In essence, the Phantom is the 1880s equivalent of a goth girlie. Even his one colourful costume - the red death - is still, you know, about death. But jokes aside, some very interesting things bubble to the surface when looking at the Phantom's wardrobe in the context of late 19th-century mourning attire, particularly with regard to gender norms and how the 'performative' aspect of this tradition differed between men and women.
Firstly, there were much stricter stipulations about mourning attire for women and children than there were for men, and womens' mourning was much more publicly obvious - partially because mens' mourning differed significantly less from their ordinary dress. In formal situations men generally wore black anyway, the only main difference being the colour of the waistcoat. Interestingly, the expected duration of the mourning period was actually considerably less in France than elsewhere in Europe - so by engaging in mourning traditions in an attention-grabbing manner, and for a length of months or years, the Phantom is definitely making a point, and a gender-non-typical one at that.
One clothing item that throws a spanner in the works is the bead-embroidered cloak - it most closely resembles a woman's opera cloak. The beading decoration on the back and across the shoulders was never seen in mens' attire of this era. Even the spanish cloak, which was an exclusively masculine garment and was very popular throughout western Europe at the end of the 19th century, is not decorated with this kind of embellishment. Faceted black beads were seen as acceptable decorations for women in the later stages of mourning, for those who wanted to add some embellishment to their wardrobe but still retain the black hue for the requisite mourning period. Many of the cloaks used in the stage show are actually decorated with authentic jet beads from exactly this kind of mourning dress - which, may I reiterate, was only worn by women.
Beaded appliques made from antique jet on the oh-so-sparkly cloak - west end, US, and west end again.
Similarly, the pocket watch chain that appears on a few Phantom costumes has a black beaded chain - at the time both gold and silver chains were common for men, but black was not. Where black beaded chains do appear historically is on womens' chatelaines.
Bringing up the colour of the Phantom's waistcoat feels a lot like beating a dead horse in this community, and other people have made excellent posts about the historical context of black waistcoats and white-tie dress in the 1880s, so I am not going to reiterate all that here. What I will say is that I am surprised at not having seen this colour choice mentioned in the context of mourning attire. It would have been inappropriate, for instance, for a man to wear any colour waistcoat other than black to attend a funeral in late-19th-century France, and given what I have outlined above in terms of the Phantom's penchant for mourning traditions, I do wonder if this at least partially informed the decision to give him a black waistcoat rather than white or cream.
Basically what the above all boils down to is that while mourning dress was observed by both men and women in 1880s France, there were strong differences between the two based on gender, and the way that the Phantom engages with mourning attire, accessories, and behaviours is far more closely aligned with what was expected of women at the time.
Closing thoughts
To conclude, I think that whether this all means anything really depends on whether one chooses to believe that the use of traditionally feminine clothing in the Phantom's costume pieces was a deliberate design choice. While the cynical angle exists that (like in many period TV dramas) it was simply an oversight, the fact that there are several instances which come from vastly different contextual backgrounds means that I am strongly tempted to say that it was an intentional decision on Maria Bjørnson's part. Why - we may never know.
Thematically, the story certainly does explore the concept of gender and gendered expectations, in multiple ways. In my mind there is something to be said for the fact that the costume pieces with unexpected gendered connotations turn up when he is pretending to be an angel or some otherworldly entity - deprived of mysterious pretenses, the Phantom does end up being simply a man in fairly gender-typical attire, and he does, of course, wear a mens' suit that challenges no gender expectations whatsoever for most of the musical. (Historically the suit is also weird, by the way. But delving into that is for a different post).
With regard to the phantom story more broadly, there are definitely other discussions to be had about gender, gender expression, and how that can lead to assumptions based on appearances. Again, these are all things that have been said elsewhere and better by people other than me. I think it is interesting how these themes translated into the visual design for the musical - whether consciously or not - and how that may inform what an audience takes away about the characters based on the clothing that they wear.
Of course, to an audience with only a superficial familiarity with historical and global fashion history, all this is going to read simply as 'old-timey clothes with lots of texture and sparkle' and to be clear, that is essential as well - one of the things that stuns me time and time again about Maria Bjørnson's designs for this production is how faultlessly she achieves that difficult balance of portraying accuracy and showing character detail through costume for the well-informed, while also creating designs that speak to an audience with no background knowledge of clothing history whatsoever. It is a monumental achievement.
I hope this has been an interesting read. If you have questions or comments or further sources to add - please say hello! As always, I would love to hear others' contributions.
Usually I prefer actual stage photos to promotional stills. But these of Rebecca Caine from the original Toronto production is just too gorgeous. I love them.
The one to the right also shows the original Wishing gown decorations well. Rich appliquées all over the velvet collar and faux vest.
For Phantom fans, this is the holiest of holy grails. These photographs allegedly depict one of the masks actually worn and used by Michael Crawford in The Phantom of the Opera. Note the lack of eyebrow (compared to modern versions of the mask), the subtle pinks in the shading, as well as the holes where the securing wire was rigged.
The Phantom’s Mandarin Robe from Vienna. Asian Phantom costume exhibtion. Ca. 1995. Although Maria Bjornson did a costume sketch for this piece, the design tends to vary substantially from production to production, with some incorporating parts of authentic antique Chinese robes and textiles.
I was trawling through operafantomet's blog again (excellent pastime which I highly recommend, by the way) and stumbled across this photoset, which shows that Cho Seung Woo's phantom costume has the chain on the left -
And upon further investigation, so does Jeon Dong Seok's and Hong Kwang Ho's (it seems like a South Korea production thing) -
Phantom of the Opera ceramic mask, produced in bisque porcelain by Clay Art beginning in 1988. Clay Art was an American company that produced a wide range of decorative ceramic wall masks. The sculpt for this mask, which is approximately life-sized, appears to be based off one of Michael Crawford’s original masks, since the shape of the eyebrow has a downward curve and is indented. Clay Art also produced a ceramic version of the famous Phantom logo mask, which we will be sharing at a later date.
Recent/current US Star Princess costumes in making. Most costumes are made by Parsons-Meares, so the extreme closeup beading photo and in-making photos from them or from their locations, shared by the depicted.
This has been sitting in my drafts for ages, so let's finally post it. Carlotta's b/w 1st act bodice on Broadway, with kick-ass beadwork and what looks like a horse or deer fichu! Love it.
(I remember Satomi Hofmann wore this horse / deer fabric, but I don't think this is her costume)
For better or for worse... they don't make'em like that anymore: Early versions of Carlotta's b/w 1st Managers costume
ROW 1: Rosemary Ashe, West End (before and after pimping)
ROW 2: Maria Moll and Evette Davis, West End
ROW 3: Patricia Hurd in Chicago, Judy Kaye and Marilyn Caskey on Broadway
ROW 4: Priti Coles in Vienna, Pamela Sanabria in Hamburg
ROW 5: Anette Stridh in Stockholm, Vera Borisova in Hamburg, Sayoko Kanai in Nagoya (and amazingly, they have kept making these costumes more or less like this from 1988 and until today)
ROW 6: Mary Ann Barcellona and Patricia Phillips in Toronto
ROW 7: Helen Noonan in Sydney and Andrea Creighton in the World Tour (made in the same Aussie style)
Question for anyone who has phantom costume knowledge, or who is better than me at finding photo sources
Does anybody know where this photo originally came from?
I found it on this post on operafantomet's blog and I am extremely curious about it as I can say with 100% certainty that those are the american duchess camille boots in the star princess colourway, which means one of two things -
They used those boots in an actual replica* production onstage, which is technically possible since this photo is credited to the australian tour in 2022 and the american duchess version of the boots was released in February that year. But due to many factors, I would find that extremely surprising. OR,
That photo is not from an actual production of the show and has been mis-attributed.
*I know the 2022 australian production was the restaged version, so technically not a replica, but the costumes were meant to have been the same.
I tried reverse image searching it but had no luck finding useful results. It looks like that photo may have been cropped from a larger image.
I would ask Anea but her blog has been inactive for over a year, so I am sending this one out to the community instead in the hope that someone can tell me.
Any help in identifying the source of the photo would be massively appreciated!
Who is Madame Firmin, you ask? The wife of the manager Firmin, of course, appearing in two scenes - sitting beside Raoul during ‘Think of Me’, and admonishing her husband right before 'Little Lotte’. I think she is played by a Carlotta understudy, but don’t quote me on that.
For someone in only two scenes, and with only one line at that, she does get a gorgeous dress. Usually it is a bustled gown with a sort of apron in front and layers of decorated skirts underneath. The waist and neckline is usually decorated as well, and the actress wears long gloves (usually white, sometimes black) as well.
