Long time no see!
Life is a complicated beast, and due to a bevy of major life changes, my cosplay life has taken a bit of a backseat in recent years. As interests and hobbies come and go in relation to the necessities of life, sometimes people let go of their old hobbies and move on.
Apparently, cosplay is not one of those hobbies for me.
It’s been hard to juggle everything in my life with this time- and money-consuming hobby, but I’ve recently made time in my schedule to work slowly and steadily on a few projects, the most current of which is a slight departure from my usual fare:
Okay, it’s still David Tennant, but I wanted to change up how I normally do this.
First and most importantly for me, I wanted to alter my definition of “screen accurate” in favor of something more useful. Around the time the Newt Scamander outfit was popular, I did a deep dive on the costume, even volunteering at FIDM in a bid to handle the costume (alas, Warner Bros. handled it separately), and discussing reweaves with various Scottish mills – I’m positive that Misan fabrics has my email posted on some wall somewhere with “Do not engage” written underneath it after all the pestering I did regarding the wool/silk suitings and the sequel costumes.
In the end, I never actually made a full costume, because I was so focused on the “screen accuracy” of it all that the project became too expensive and too overwhelming and now I have nothing to show for it. I did not want to repeat that, nor do I want that to become my normal cosplay pattern.
Secondly, I wanted to build this quickly, without too much hard labor on unimportant details (see #1). It doesn’t matter how painstaking my work is… if it never gets finished.
And thirdly, I wanted to keep it in a reasonable budget. Making cosplay fun requires me to not feel guilty about it.
So next I went to start my journey.
The first thing to do was to determine which costume I would create – he wears many in the show. But this was an easy one.
The Crowley Prime outfit (as I like to call it) is so stylish, so sleek, and so recognizable that it would be almost silly not to start there.
Next I needed to identify the pieces and their hallmarks. Thankfully, as you can see above, I was lucky enough to visit the Hero costume in LA at FIDM in 2019. This was (As it always is) indispensably helpful. From this alone I was able to create a breakdown of the costume, as follows:
Clothing:
-Black tank top undershirt (evidenced in Ep. 6 but not seen on display)
-Black collarless dress shirt (jersey knit)
-Black waistcoat (jersey knit)
-Black peak-lapel jacket (channel-quilted cotton sateen)
-Faded black jeans with self-stripe (waxed denim)
-Black socks
Accessories:
-Sunglasses
-Chain necklace
-Knitted metallic scarf/necklace
-Black leather belt with snake buckle
-Snakeskin shoes
-Watch (also absent from the mannequin display but often featured onscreen)
-Contact lenses (the eyes are a very important part of the look)
-Temple tattoo
Phew. Already this was shaping up to be a larger project than I’d imagined!
But I had my work cut out for me and I was excited to get started.
After some research into these pieces, I was dismayed – nearly the entire costume had been made from scratch by Angels Costumes. Woof. But I was no longer committed to an unachievable level of “screen accuracy,” so reasonable substitutes should suffice here in order to push the project along. But after looking simply for the basics (starting with the jeans and the dress shirt), it quickly became clear that I could get nowhere near my intended target off-the-rack. At least some level of custom tailoring for all pieces would be needed to achieve even a slightly lower-tiered look.
So I got to work.
I invite you to take this journey with me, where we will deep dive on all of the above-mentioned items, and you can watch a full from-scratch cosplay come to life.
More to come.
Something about this cosplay build you want to make sure I talk about? Drop a comment below!
The Ginger Doctor 
Hooray to the return of long-form journaling!