Building a costume: Bata de colita con luces

Hello, and welcome, patrons of the arts! If you're here, you're probably interested in how I built the lighted dress for my NACHMO 2024 performance at the Foundry, March 29th 2024. Read on for all the best secrets of kit-bashing wearable props.

The basic design of this dress is taken from traditional flamenco costuming. Flamenco dancers sometimes wear a long-trained skirt called a bata de cola, lit. "skirt with tail". Here's a clip of how they are traditionally used

I'm not sure what flamenco dresses were made of back in the day (heavy silk satin, maybe?) but in modern times, they're almost universally made of a 4-way synthetic stretch knit. There are a lot of advantages to this; the fabric is heavy, doesn't wrinkle, and flows evenly in all directions. Colors are vibrant and you can get it in either a matte or a semi-satin finish that gives a nice sheen on stage. Critically, stretch knits also do not need to be hemmed, which is a godsend when you are making a giant skirt festooned with many, many yards of circular ruffles.

Typically a bata de cola will have a train of six feet or so, but there's frankly a limit to how much time I'm willing to spend gluing LEDs in place. The train on this skirt is only a few feet -- just long enough to drag on the floor and pull the skirt out wide when I walk. More of a bata de colita, really. 

Back skirt panel.

The outer shell and lining of the dress are built from the same black Spandex knit, which is reasonably cheap and comes in a 60" width, important for cutting out wide panels like the skirt here. I don't really use patterns when I sew; I find it easier to eyeball, trace, and drape most things. The front bodice was roughed out using a leotard that I know fits me well, and the skirt portion is equivalent to a 1/8th circle panel in the front, divided in half, and a full 1/4 circle panel in the back which has been extended as far as the corner of the panel would allow to form the train. Only the back panel is fully lined in netting, partly for stiffness and partly to help support the wiring inside. 

Whipstitching the braid in place.

An un-trained bata needs little structure on the inside, but batas de cola often have some combination of nylon tulle (aka can-can net) and horsehair braid on the inside to give the skirt some body. Long strips of 4" horsehair braid stiffen the hem all the way around my dress, and run up the center front under the trim to keep the corners nice and the separating zipper from distorting the front panel, and there is some in the waistband to support the weight of the skirt. Horsehair, which is now made of nylon, is an open braid of stiff fibers. The woven structure allows it to ease around curves, but the fibers support hems or edges and keep the fabric from crumpling or warping when it moves. While you generally can sew it down by machine, the way sewing machines form stitches mean the thread has to go through all layers of the garment. I don't want this to be visible from the outside, so I whipstitched it by hand to just the can-can net before attaching the lining.

I'm not sure what you're "supposed" to do about all the poky fiber ends when you cut horsehair braid. There's probably a traditional way to cover it or handle tucking it in. Whatever it is, I did not do that. I am the child of an engineer. I had a roll of 1/2" electrical tape handy. Guess what I covered the ends with.

I did not wire the LEDs by hand. I do not hate myself that much. I used a pre-built LED smart curtain, like this one, sporting 10 strings of 30 LEDs each to thread through various parts of the dress. The skirt contains 7 x 30 lights, with 1 x 30 strings running up each arm into the palms, and one optional string coming up the center back to wind into my hair. 

These curtains use RGB LED-on-a-chip elements strung on a flexible insulated wire. The number of colors they can reproduce is more a matter of the remote (or app) than the diodes. The super cheap ones might admit they can do seven (red, blue, green, cyan, magenta, yellow, white), but realistically, a diode with RGB(+W) elements of independently-variable intensity can reproduce 16 million-ish colors well enough to impress the audience. (Play with an RGB color mixer to try it yourself!) I haven't dug around too much at the chip level, but the animation modes the app comes with by default suggest that the elements are independently addressable. LEDs are tolerant of voltages anywhere between about 2.5 and 6V and take single-digit milliamps of current. Even a 300-LED smart curtain with Bluetooth controls runs easily on a USB power bank, which is exactly how I'm working mine.

Using a pre-made curtain saves me days of soldering, and as a bonus comes with a built-in Bluetooth receiver that allows me to adjust the lights with a smartphone or tablet -- including a mode where I can program my own animations -- or have a confederate do it while I'm performing, as we're doing for NACHMO.

They blink in a very satisfying fashion. Observe.

(Excuse the mess. My floor doesn't usually look like that. It's usually much worse.)

What I did do by hand is glue all of those lights in place. The strings were woven through tiny holes clipped directly into the top fabric of the skirt; Spandex knit doesn't fray, so no edge finish was needed here. They didn't come loose, but the tension wasn't quite enough to keep the LED elements in place, and they wanted to slip between the layers instead of resting on top. I tested a few adhesives to see what would stick to both the PVC blobs that enclose the diodes and the surface of the fabric. Good old-fashioned E6000 would probably work, but it's a mess and the skirt would have to lay completely flat and undisturbed for over a day to make sure it cured properly. I don't have that kind of patience. Cyanoacrylate (Super Glue/Crazy Glue) is a pretty good bet for plastics, but the stuff in the bottles is very liquid and would likely soak through the top layer of the skirt, the can-can net inside, and into the lining, which would stick all the skirt layers together with very stiff little dots.

PITA, but minimal PITA.

Fortunately, Gorilla makes cyanoacrylate adhesive tape! I did spend several hours snipping tiny pieces of the stuff to size and delicately sticking them down, and now there are four jillion tiny pieces of wax paper backing that I've missed while sweeping up. It was an order of magnitude less of a gooey disaster than a liquid adhesive would have been, though. If you go this route, I recommend also picking up a bottle of old-school nail polish remover. I got mine from the Dollar Tree. These are mostly acetone, which releases CA glue and prevents you from accidentally gluing your scissors shut. Not that I know that from experience or anything.

Another important element of this costume was the trim. Traditionally, flamenco costumes are decked out with dozens of yards of ruffles, which make the skirt look fuller and accentuate the movement. I wasn't so concerned about that -- I wanted the audience to look at the lights. So instead of ruffles, I opted for bands of holographic silver sequin trim. Holographic finishes use a tiny interference grid impressed on the surface of a metallized paper or plastic sheet. The metallic surface reflects light straight back to the viewer, but passing it through the crude diffraction grating breaks it into prismatic bands, bouncing different colors in different directions. Learn more about it here.

The final piece of the dress to be applied were the sleeves. I experimented with two or three different designs, but ultimately opted to leave the back of the bodice open, with the sleeves attached only to the front side seams to keep them up. 

Power mesh, stay! STAY.

These are made of power mesh, a lightweight 4-way stretch fabric with a very open net-like weave pattern that preserves both the integrity and the translucency of the material. Skintone power mesh is common in dance and figure skating costumes, where it fills in a lot of the "open" areas you see, and prevents "wardrobe malfunctions" while performing. Here, because the material is see-through, it means I can run lights up the undersides of my arms and have them stay secure and visible. 

Power mesh is a pain in the neck to work with. It's very light, very stretchy, and wiggles when you cut it. I had to stake it to a chunk of cardboard to get my edges cut mostly straight. It does move beautifully, though.

The final dress is deceptively weighty -- the double horsehair in the waist holds most of the weight of the skirt, and keeps the wiring harness contained, but it still drags heavily on the floor behind me. This is actually important for performance. The weight of the bata is what allows the dancer to kick it around effectively. Lighter, floatier fabric wouldn't work the same. The "top" of the curtain is buried in the waistband, so the lights flow down the dress and out to the ends of the sleeves. 

The final effect is mesmerizing and well worth all the work. 

As always, I want to thank all of my Patrons for helping with supplies and construction for this project, as well as NACHMO Boston, for giving me the opportunity to perform, as well as some of my instructors (Yosi Karahashi, Pat Planet), and karen Krolak and KRD, for all of their support in my artistic endeavors. 

If you'd like to support me in building more brilliant light-up things, check out my arts Patreon, or send supplies off of my Amazon Wish List!