Creating the Pagan Costumes


First Ideas

From researching websites, films and documentaries, I have now seen a lot of different pagan groups and their styles and different costumes, ranging all over Europe. I have gathered from my research that many of the materials which are used to create these costumes are easily accessible, some customs use simple cloth or burlap dyed different shades. Pagans also tend to blend in man made materials with natural, such as a normal fabric base layer covered in leaves, feathers or fur. Some Pagan wildmen also wear goat horns on their heads and in some costumes they may wear a full animal skull. Another natural material incorporated with the costumes could be vegetables, wearing a necklace of chilis or garlic is part of some pagan traditions.

With all that I have gathered, I sketched some ideas I thought of to create the costumes with:

Concept 1

This costume idea uses a base layer of normal fabric clothes. These clothes will have different colours of fur sewed to them.

A largish sized helmet will be worn when wearing this costume (such as a hard hat or american football helmet), by attaching many pieces of fur to the top of it so it hangs down and makes the pagans head look big will create a frightening character. 

To also create a more unusual looking costume which is what I am aiming to do, I designed the top of the characters head to have stray pieces of rope coming from the top. On the eyes of the character I designed, it shows goggles being worn, as goggles are man made and usually come from store and are branded, it does not completely fit the pagan codes and conventions, but I designed them to like very hand made and amateur, using ropes, and wood carved in to circles for the eyes of the goggles.

Concept 2

The second drawing is a more humane concept to the first one. With more of mixture man made and natural materials.  The head of pagan shows a simple fabric mask with an odd slice above the eyebrow region, again just added this to make it look more unusual. I also designed this mask to have horns of a goat, to display a more a satanic effect to the costume.

The base layer of the costume is a tunic made using fabric, and over the front, shoulders and upper arms, hangs some seaweed, which is relevant to our story as it takes place on a seaside island. Thin brown ropes are used to keep the tunic tight and on the legs I designed fur shorts that will be worn. On the characters feet normal shoes will be worn but will be wrapped up in bandages and when worn for a while when walking around, they will look quite fray and used. In the characters hand is a small brown pouch prop that fits the outfit.                 

                

The third concept would be designed to fit a smaller person for the role, Using a large white fur overcoat with a large fur mask, again using the helmet method to make the head look bigger. Black leather gloves would be worn to keep the heat in. This design is more fitted to a snowy environment. I sketched this 'wildman' with a spear type weapon with a bag similar to the bag held in concept 2. These pouches I've drawn may or may not be used in the film with a sacrificial significance, maybe the hearts of those sacrificed will be put in the bag. Rope again is used as a belt but more for the hand made pagan aesthetic. Below the waste of the character is a skirt/kilt made from straw, In my research I came across many different pagans with different tradition but many had straw in common, so I believe that it is well fitting to our short.

Next, Going to Start the Costumes 

My group along with the rest  of our media class went to the Crawfordsburn Beach in order to collect some materials needed to make our costumes back in the school art department. 

The whole class helped us collect seaweed and shells to be used for making the costumes. For all costumes, a burlap material base will be used. The seaweed and shells will be glued on to the burlap to create different costumes for the pagans, with a shore / 'washed up' feel to the costumes.

We collected all the seaweed and seashells in black bags, to bring them back up to school and store them until they are needed to create the costumes. With the knowledge that it would smell, the seaweed was stored inside our school's greenhouse.

We drilled a small hole in each of the shells using the equipment in the technology department. When all the shells had holes in them, we threaded string through them and tied a knot after each. These shells will be suspended from one of the costumes and some of the other shells will be glued onto another.

This idea comes from our favourite of all the Pagan Wild Men costumes, where small rocks were suspended from one man's costume.

As stated, we used shells rather than rocks to give the pagans a more seaside / 'washed up' look to their attire.

These are two of the costumes almost completed (shown above and below), modelled by Rachel and Rudi in the art department. Each costume will be worn by the pagans along with a mask or a hood. The costume shown (left) is a real pagan dress that inspired the first costume. As you can see, the costume contains a large amount of hay joined to the body.  Instead of using hay, we decided to use seaweed as the main decoration of this costume.

This is the pagan costume that our second costume was modelled on, which all members of our group have decided is the favourite of any (Pagan Wild Man) costume that we have seen. This dress used clam shells or rocks suspended on strings but we decided to use more generic, white shells instead.