Cats Costumes

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Costumes Made Summer - Fall, 1999
Webpage Made July 14, 2004

My first experience seeing the musical, "Cats", on stage was 12 years ago when I was 8 years old, when we saw it as a family. I was entranced! The dancing, the music, the costumes - it was just amazing. Since then, I have seen it live 7 more times, from Washington, DC, to Richmond, VA, to Baltimore, Maryland, and also Broadway in New York. We all went up to NYC for my 16th birthday because after 19 years they were finally going to close down the show and we wanted to see it before it left. So, we were very fortunate to see it just four days before it closed down - so sad, but wonderful. My whole family had a blast in the three days we spent up there, we also managed to get tickets to the Phantom of the Opera as well, which was beyond fantastic!! I may post photos of the trip up here a little later.

At any rate, when they put Cats onto video in either 1998 or 1999 (can't remember!) we were hooked all over again, and became even more obsessed with it than we were before. Then Brynn and I decided that we wanted to make costumes from the play that we could wear for Halloween. Below are few photos of our costumes along with some construction notes.
Enjoy! :-)

Supplies and Notes: The characters that we chose to do were Bombalurina (Me), which is the red cat, and Demeter (Brynn) the yellow and black cat. For the main part of the costumes, we used a cotton/lycra unitard with a zipper down the back that can be purchased at any dance store, online or otherwise. They tend to run more expensive in stores, we bought ours from ADADance.com
The wigs were also purchased from ADA, though when we bought them, they were white. Mine is a Japanese Beast wig and Brynn's was a Rubies Cat Kit. (It also came with her legwarmers.) My legwarmers were constructed from pieces of faux fur from JoAnn's and then sewn together. The gloves I used were some leather elbow-length gloves I bought from the thrift store, then the "fur" at the top is a white feather boa and I cut the fingertip ends off of the gloves. These were then hand painted with fabric markers.
All the color and "cat markings" on the unitard and wigs were done with fabric pens (LOTS OF THEM!) bought from JoAnn's. The fur around our shoulders was made with a black feather boa (mine) cut into pieces and faux fur (Brynn's.)
Lastly, the tails and shoes; I used my old Jazz shoes, and Brynn wore my old Saddle shoes. The tails were made from a feather boa (Brynn's) and a rust and orange-colored chunky yarn scarf (Mine.)

Oh yeah, my spiked collar was bought at Claire's, but they sell better ones at Hot Topic. (Just didn't have my license back then to get there!!)

L-R: Brynn (Demeter) & Meaghan (Bombalurina)

All costumes seen on this page were researched and made by Meaghan and Brynn. Photos were taken by our mom. Cats and it's characters are copyright The Really Useful Group and Andrew Lloyd Webber, no copyright infringement was ever intended!! Graphics seen on this page were created with Ulead Photo Editer by Meaghan. Page was also made and maintained by Meaghan.