Pickelhaube helmets for the Kit Kat Girls

[labricoleuse]

As soon as i saw Jen Caprio's designs for the show, one of the elements that leapt out at me as a major craftwork endeavor was the Kit Kat Girl costumes for the "Mein Herr" number. Her design incorporated drapes of pearls, numerous iron crosses, and the aesthetically singular spiked German helmet called a Pickelhaube.

I'm a huge fan of words and vocabulary, and i prefer finding out the proper name for an item instead of making up some shorthand like "Kaiser helmet" or whatever. I also studied German for several years and was an exchange student in Berlin in high school, so this show has been a wonderful excuse to expand my Deutsche Vokabeln, as it were. For example, die Rotsamtstiefeln is German for "the red velvet boots!"

But i digress.

Costume design collage by Jen Caprio



I posted this image in my shop so i could learn the right names for all the parts of the Pickelhauben.

Initially, i thought we were going to have to make these pieces from scratch. Sure, you can buy Pickelhaube replicas but they start at $150 each, and we needed seven of them. We also needed helmets which would be lightweight enough for our actresses to perform their choreography unencumbered. And lastly, we needed to age them so they looked sad and tarnished, so renting was not an option either. But that's okay. I love challenges like these!

First mockup.

Initially i thought we would make these by purchasing seven of these plastic helmets (a bargain at $9 apiece!), cutting them down to the shallower-crowned Pickelhaube shape, and adding all the gold motifs, probably as Wonderflex cutouts. What you see above was a physical starting place to talk with the designer about the scale of the spike, the depth of the crown, and so forth. That "spike" is a doorknob housing and the tip of a cane, and the strap across the front, the Schuppenkette, is made from an alligator-embosses leather which has been painted gold.

Then though, i found these costume helmets from a UK Fancy Dress company for only $7 each. We figured, even if the helmet itself was flimsy and awful, we could take the spike and the gold motifs off of them, so we ordered a batch of these as well. When they came in, they turned out to be just perfect for what we needed! Sturdy enough to stand up to the run of a show, but lightweight enough for our Kit Kat Girls to do their movements with ease.

Helmet at right is brand new from the supplier. Helmet at left has been aged with black French Enamel Varnish. Each helmet then had to be fit to the actress' head, padded in various ways for stability, and lined either with fabric or rubber shelf liner (depending on how sleek and slippery their hair is).




"You have to understand the way I am, mein Herr!"
Kelsey Didion in foreground as "Fritzie," Meredith Jones in background as "Helga"
Photo courtesy of Halle Sinnott at the Daily Tarheel