Westworld‘s Dolores Abernathy is the kind of character you don’t forget after watching the HBO series. She’s inquisitive enough to get out of her narrative and find a new path. Enayla Cosplay, who’s been making costumes for a little over 10 years, tackled making a replica of Dolores’ blue dress; it’s so screen accurate you’d think she was a double. It wasn’t an easy costume to make. Enayla told Nerdist, “Dolores is one of those deceptively simple costumes that was really tough to replicate.”
Since the materials used in Dolores’ dress appeared to be custom or vintage, Enayla ended up making almost the entire costume by hand. The entire process took about six months. She went as far as crafting the undergarments from scratch because she wanted the silhouette to look just right and doing about six mock-ups to get the bodice and skirt pattern precise. Enayla also experimented with leather working for the first time for the belt pouch and belt.
The most challenging aspect of making the Dolores costume was the material. “Matching Dolores’s fabric was by far the biggest struggle for me,” Enayla said, “It has a dot pattern that’s common in vintage fabric but very unusual to find today. I spent a long time searching for it online and finally settled for an upholstery fabric. I constructed my first version of the dress after eight or nine dye baths (the fabric was really resisting dye!), but I was never completely happy with it. About a month later, I found a far more accurate fabric locally and I couldn’t resist making the top layer over again. This new fabric took dye beautifully and gave me a chance to tweak the dress pattern slightly in my remake.”
Hop on the nearest horse and gallop to the gallery below to see more photos of the completed Dolores costume (including one with a Teddy) and to get a look at some of the making-of details. Enayla regularly makes spot on costume replicas, so be sure to follow her latest projects on Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter.
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Do you cosplay or take photographs of cosplayers? Then I want to see your work so we can talk about highlighting your creations in a future Cosplay Friday gallery. If you’re a photographer, maybe we could focus on your images from a single convention. If you’re interested, please get in touch with me at alratcliffe@yahoo.com and send photos you’d like me to feature–the more high-res the photos, the better. Be sure to provide credits for the cosplayers or photographers for each image because giving credit is good manners–bonus points if you include links to relevant Facebook pages or websites. Though I wish I knew all the nerdy franchises, I don’t, so please let me know who or what is being cosplayed.
Images: Enayla Cosplay and Soul Studios
