Morticia and Gomez Addams
I found this long, black dress with a mermaid silhouette on the $1 rack at the thrift store and knew that I would turn it into a Morticia costume. The dress needed some slight alterations, and a needed black hair and pale skin. Apart from that, the outfit was very simple.
I decided to use very vary fair make up – rather than white make up – for two or three reasons. First, it’s “real” make up, so it will go on, and stay on, better than Halloween grease paint. Also, Morticia isn’t dead. She just doesn’t go out into the sun a lot. I wanted to look human, just very fair. I also added some cat-eye eyeliner, black mascara, and deep red lipstick. But that was it – again to make her look very washed out.
I posted my experiments with three different types of temporary hair color – spray, rinse and gel – in other posts. In the end, I decided to use the gel, followed up by a bit of the colored spray, and then sort of locked in place with a bunch of hair spray. While my fingers kept getting a bit dingy throughout the evening, overall the hair held up well. I was very VERY careful not to get wet, though.
The dress had one or two problems.
First, it was sleeveless. And Morticia has long tight sleeves. I found a lacy blouse with tight sleeves that buttoned up the front and wore that underneath. It worked perfectly. It also seemed like her sleeves were extremely long- or perhaps had a peak that extended down to her ring finger. I couldn’t figure out an easy way to get that to happen, but I poked holes in the lace near the end of the sleeves to make thumb holes. I got enough of the effect of extra-long, tight sleeves to make me happy.
Also, it wasn’t quite low-cut enough. So I did a quick alteration by just making a slit down the front and pinning the edges back to form a V. I accidentally cut it too low, but that didn’t matter much because of the lacy under-shirt. I buttoned the lacy blouse up as far as I needed, and then literally stapled the rest of the fabric back. It was a last minute costume fix, but worked out just fine.
The hardest part of the costume, honestly, was getting the hair right.
Gomez was basically a double-breasted suit, a pencil mustache, slicked back hair, and a cigarillo. As with Morticia, it’s really just garment + hair = costume.
Casual Costuming 