JESSICA RABBIT
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Photographer
Why I chose to make this costume:
Jessica Rabbit has always been one of the most mesmerizing cartoon characters to me—as a kid she made me watch the movie over and over again, and as a cosplayer, she was always a huge challenge for me to portray. I've been collecting materials for her for almost 2 years, and wanted to make this costume to the best to my abilities.
How I made this costume:
The shape is not Photoshopped, just clever cosplay engineering. I drafted & made a custom corset to create the extreme shape and then made the dress to fit over it. I engineered 2 Victoria's Secret Miraculous bras into the corset, which is steel boned coutil. The extreme illusion is created by pulling in the waist, padding the top and wearing a booty bump hahaha.
The dress itself is made from a spandex sequin fabric, and 1000+ S20 Swarovski crystals are glued on the fabric for extra bling, tedious time consuming handywork with help from Mary Cahela. I specifically chose pink instead of red for the dress because in the movie her famous singing scene features a pink dress. I also like the color combo: orange hair/pink dress/purple gloves more than the red dress which can sometimes come across as "lady of the night" in certain lighting. Pink makes the entire outfit look more cartoon-y! Here is a YouTube video of Jessica in the pink dress doing her famous stage performance from the movie. Here is a work in progress collage of my Jessica Rabbit dress.
I adore my wig which is a Matilda from Arda Wigs! Styled with help from Ara Fernando! I also went with the route of cartoon makeup, covering up my eyebrows and painting over them. It was a risky choice for makeup, and since it was Dragoncon I got my share of comments about going drag lol, but when I decided to portray such an iconic character as Jessica Rabbit, I didn't want to fall short on the makeup when everything else was so exaggerated.
Thoughts on this costume:
It was definitely an intense experience to cosplay Jessica Rabbit. The heels were high, I couldn't see with all that hair covering the right side of my face, I was wearing an extreme shaping corset, and there was no pause between photos. I wore this costume for 4 hours at Dragoncon and couldn't do anything but BE Jessica. This was definitely one of my most character acting-intensive cosplays. So happy I did it! Thank you so much to my awesome photographer friends for taking photos with me!!!
