Comfy costuming

Having attended DragonCon for the past 3 years, I have learned the following if nothing else;

1)Time spent not in costume feels like time wasted
2)Time spent suffering from a costume feels like hell


The first, I think, is relatively self-explanatory. I pay a lot of money to attend those 4 days of D*C, which more often than not is the only 4 days a year I get to spend with most of my costumer and/or fandom friends. I want to get in every second of geeky goodness I can!

The second will likely make sense to most anyone, but only someone who's ever been there will really feel my pain. Cons, renaissance festivals and SCA events put us in different physical and emotional situations than our normal 9-5, the practical upshot being that discomfort tends to get magnifed exponentially. Tall heels, heavy costumes, tightly laced corsets and tons of layers can be worn fairly easily for a short photo session in air-conditoned comfort, but those little twinges of discomfort can and will turn into surprisingly severe pain and soreness. Don't get me wrong, you'll pry my 4" heels out of my cold dead hands, but I can only take them for so long before they start to get painful, so wearing them all day and night while doing a lot of standing, walking, posing, dancing and socializing just isn't going to happen.

I mentioned rennaisance festivals and SCA events in with cons, but there's an important distinction to be made on the subject of comfort, I think. While I do have minimum standards of comfort for a con costume, and do limit the amount of time I spend in anythng I'm going to pay for later, my SCA philosophy is much different, largely because the activities and settings are so different. I spend my cons in hotel rooms, restaurants, bars and ballrooms. I spend my SCA events in camps (that I help set up), kitchens (that I'm often running), parties and gatherings (I usually had a hand in planning, or at least have offered assistance with) and spaces that I, as an attendee, am expected to help set up, maintain and clean. In short, I have things to do at SCA events that just can't be done in white satin, no matter how much I love it.

Anyway, practical upshot of all the above is that I've decided to spend some time focusing on con costumes that, while not frumpy or unflattering, are comfortable enough to be worn all day. I'll do a seperate post for each for ease of keeping my thoughts straight (especially when I go back and do a write-up for each), but the above is pretty much my philosophy for all of them.