Creating Cinderella’s costumes

The team at English National Ballet worked with over 60 costume makers to make costumes that range from outlandish masks to a gorgeous Ball dress, all designed by Julian Crouch.

There are 197 roles in the ballet, split between over 90 dancers (there are over 130 dancers working on the production) who will be using 215 costumes in each performance.

To make things even more challenging for the Cinderella costumiers, our heroine, her prince, the stepsisters and many other roles need up to four costume changes throughout the ballet.

As well as this vast number, the range of costumes is varied: in this production, human characters live alongside more fantastical ones, such a bird ladies and dancing conkers!

Each piece of costume is made to fit our dancers, and involves a huge amount of craft.

Look at the details on the beautiful costumes for the Ballroom scene: each of the 24 male dancers wears a waistcoat with hand-painted flowers and a frock coat. It takes Symone Frost, our Dyer/Painter, four hours to paint the fabric for one waistcoat. Multiply that by 24 waistcoats, that represents 12 working days of painting.

Cinderella’s ball dress has three layers of net: two under-layers, one pale green and one pale pink, and a top skirt which is a combination of a sparkly, golden net and a soft net digitally printed with a distinctive feather pattern.

The bodice has a soft, skin tone net base on top of which the feather patterned net is stitched to create an organic, fan shape. An embroidery is then appliqued on top of it, along with more than 200 crystals.

Come and see these magical costumes in their full glory when Cinderella in-the-round comes to the stunning Royal Albert Hall from 15 – 25 June 2023.