Honoka Kosaka (Wedding Dress)

Series: Love Live

First worn: Sakura-Con 2017 – Seattle, WA

Awards won: 1st Place, OtakuFair X GamEXpo 2017, San Antonio, TX

This costume in my arsenal holds the title of “most expensive costume” out of all my outfits. It is about $800 in silk charmeuse and silk organza, plus $200 in embroidery stabilizer. I use this outfit as an example of why folks should not balk at the cost of wedding dresses these days; a silk wedding dress is not cheap in materials at all.

This dress utilizes techniques to precisely position multiple hoopings across a predetermined grid, as well as techniques to precisely position hoopings on an arbitrary curve. Unlike the Ayesha costume, where I could do all of the scallops on one section of the dress and sew the panels together, the Honoka wedding dress required me to minimize the number of visible seams, requiring the use of alternative alignment techniques.  Due to the nature of silk, I endeavored to not use registration marks to do the alignment and instead integrated specific features in the embroidery design itself to assist with the alignment.

The lining of the dress, as shown, is two layers of silk organza.  One layer had the “School Idol Festival” in a calligraphic font embroidered, and the other layer was added to provide additional opacity for the organza itself.  The embroidery design to put the lettering on was specifically designed so that alignment crosshair stickers can be used.

The lining is actually secured to the dress using satin stitches on the dress itself.  To do this, the scallop design on the dress is split into specific sections, and a color change is purposely programmed into the design to accomplish the split.  Then, using cutwork techniques, the organza lining is secured to the charmeuse dress section with the cut line stitch, then the raw edges are covered with satin stitches.

The general structure of the dress involves a gathered bodice strip over an fitted bodice, and the two layers of the skirt are a half-circle and a half-ellipse.  The front of the skirt are two big half-circles that serves as a flounce.

The medallion in the center was 3D printed with PLA.  The original costume used papercrafting flowers for the two front tails, but that was replaced with 3D printed flowers with a built-in hole to glue in snaps.

The gloves are derived from Vogue Patterns V7949.  The veil is made of polyester organza, with a derivative of the scallop pattern.  The collar is made of faux fur with built-in attachments for the string of beads that drape over the shoulder.  The garter is also made of silk charmeuse, with fake pearls inlaid with wire.  Due to the sheer weight of the wire and the pearls, the garter cannot be taken off and thrown at people.