Museum of Science Fiction teams with DDA costume students for exhibition
April 27, 2016MFA students and costume shop staff have entered into a very exciting partnership with the in-development Museum of Science Fiction.
This link takes you to an article that gives an overview of how we got involved, and you can watch a brief video about it at this link.
Students will reproduce a flight attendant uniform from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a “still suit” from the film Dune and the famous Neo trench coat from The Matrix.
Museum of Science Fiction Replica #1: 2001 Flight Attendant
Graduate student (now alumna ’15) Denise Chukhina adjusts the jacket.
One challenge of this project was building the costume for a display form instead of a human being.
Look how tall our mannequin is!
Mockup of jacket and hat – at this point, Denise was working with scale and proportion and figuring out the patterns for making the finished pieces. Denise drafted and draped the patterns for these garments from measurements and research images, and made the garments from materials provided by the Museum.
We worked with Richelle Devereaux-Murray, Emerson College costume shop supervisor, to produce our custom embroidery of the jacket logo. (Note our sweet MOSF label in the lining, too!)
The finished hat has this cool 3D printed medallion on it! We worked with science librarian David Romito, who helped us take the original PanAm medallion (which is much smaller than this one), digitize the shape, and print it on a MakerBot at the UNC Research Hub here on campus.
We had three fabricated, just in case we needed extras. Here they are sprayed first with plastic primer…
…then they were painted with metallic paint and foiled for reflectivity. Shown before foiling here with one of the research images.
The Grip Shoes are perhaps the most iconic part of this costume!
The unusual shape of the mannequin’s feet made this a particular challenge.
Logo color/scale tests on the white leather.
Ready for display! She will be on view at various preview events, fundraisers, and installations between now and the opening of the museum in DC.
See her and much more now at Reagan National Airport, where the first exhibition opened July 7.
Read more in UNC’s Daily Tar Heel: http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/04/costume-designers-at-unc-create-for-museum