(Book of Bill/ARG Spoilers!) Planning a Bill Cipher Cosplay (Dress Shirts and Details) (Pt. 3)

Back at it again to be autistic about this livid Dorito!

Hopefully y'all enjoyed the last entry I made detailing my ideas and plans for this project of mine. This one will (hopefully) be shorter than the last one considering how much the jacket makes the cosplay.

Let's do this!

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DISSECTING A DRESS SHIRT

What are the components of a dress shirt? The main details that we have to look into for designing a dress shirt are: the material, the collar, the placket and the cuffs.

Material

The material is what its made of. Cotton, rayon, silk, polyester, etc., etc. For this project I want a solid white cotton. Like before, you're going to be running around a hot, crowded convention hall in makeup, a wig and a bunch of other stuff. You need your material to be breathable, lest you end up in the med tent, chugging a Dasani and missing out on panels.

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The Collar

It's the part that goes around your neck! There's a few different kinds, but the kind I'm interested in is the wingtip collar.

Considering Bill Cipher's bowtie, and the fact that he never destroys his home dimension without one, any shirt design needs to accommodate for that. Wingtip collars are explicitly designed for bowties and help bring out that 'trying too hard to be put together' theater kid that lies in the character. It's not like you're gonna roll up and see him in Grunkle Stan's casual fit!

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Placket Design

"Ok, what the fuck is a placket?" I had to learn what a placket is during the research of this project so now you have to know as well. A placket is the finished opening, whether that be on a skirt or a shirt, or whatever you're making, that gets fastened closed with hooks, buttons, or any other kind of fastener.

Here's some examples of plackets!

Now what kind of placket design are we going for with this cosplay?

After too much digging and deliberating, I found this website:

https://www.dragonuniform.com/shirt-plackets-design.html

Among the diagrams, the one that stuck out to me was on this infographic:

Specifically the 'Placket Add Ribbon Trim Loop' from the first column, fourth row. I am not a fan of the idea of loops but I fell in LOVE with the idea of adding black ribbon to the dress shirt. 

This is the best example of the idea, but this shirt is 90$ and they don't carry my size :/. 

So, black trim with buttons against a white shirt. Snazzy! Again, it brings the classy, trying too hard to be put together while also NOT clashing with the excessively detailed lapels, mentioned in Pt.2.

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The Cuffs

Since the arms will be hidden within the jacket, we're going to skip straight to the last visible portion of the shirt: the cuffs!

Can't have an unfinished sleeve after all! To be angular (and fancy as heck!) I thought the French (Square) cuff would be best. The thing about French cuff is...where are the buttons?! That leads us toooo......

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Cufflinks

Surprise! It's cufflinks!

I thought a fun and silly (and depressing) detail to add could be some red and blue triangle cufflinks. Red on the right, blue on the left. There's plenty to buy, here's a couple that caught my eye:

I'd probably contact someone on Etsy to make a custom pair as I don't possess the skill necessary to make my own, at least to the quality that I'd want.

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BOWTIE

Of course we can't forget this! Luckily it's pretty easy to find people selling black silk bowties, so I'll pay the troll toll when that comes around. 

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Thanks for reading, I hope y'all enjoyed this cosplay/research journey so far and I can't wait to share more!

- <3