Hello, friends! It’s been awhile. My apologies for the lack of updates; I finally gotten my examination date confirmed (Dec. 3!) and have been in intensive study mode since then. Beyond that, my partner Ellen and I have been preparing a new waltz routine for a showcase and so practice has been consuming what little extra time and attention I have. That does, however, bring us to today’s topic: dance clothes!
A few years ago, when I was getting serious about ballroom, a friend of mine who’d already started competing was telling me about the troubles her partner was having paying for a tuxedo. “No problem!” I said. “Tell him to go to After Hours, tell them he’s in catering, and he’ll get a decent-looking tuxedo for $75. He can then replace it item by item, rather than dropping $1400 at once.”
That wouldn’t work, she told me. And thus began my education on dance clothing.
Clothes for dancing, whether formalwear or other types of costumes, are different than those for everyday events. They are tailored with a very important distinction in mind: regular clothes are designed to look good when you’re standing still, and dance clothes are designed to look good while you’re moving. Let’s take the tuxedo my friend was asking about. A regular tuxedo consits of three pieces: a pair of pants, a shirt, and a jacket. While regular pants hang off your waist, whether from a belt, bracers, or your hips, dance pants are designed to hug your hips and legs to show off your lines. Regular shirts hang from one’s shoulders and are bunched around the waist, while dance shirts often feature a crotch like a leotard in order to pull the shirt taut across the entire torso. Finally, jackets that may look good while standing around normally often bunch up when arms are raised in dance position; to solve this, dance jackets remove all shoulder padding (allowing the jacket to hang across the frame, and may be designed to stretch or feature internal boning in order to keep the jacket in connection with the entire torso.
Women’s dresses have just as many complications and alterations for dancing as the men’s clothes do. I won’t get into them here, since I’m not particularly experienced with women’s clothing, but you should be aware of them.
All these changes come at a price. Making dance clothing is a specialized form of tailoring, one beyond the range of most tailors except by very expensive trial and error. Fortunately, there are solutions
The first thing you need to ask yourself is what you need the clothing for. If you’re getting clothing for social dancing it almost doesn’t matter what you wear as long as you like the way it looks and it doesn’t interfere with your or anyone else’s dancing (i.e. no skirts that trail on the floor and can be tripped on). If you’re doing a competition, you want something simple, eye-catching, and versatile – simple because it will show off your lines, eye-catching so that the judges’ eyes will be drawn to you, and versatile so that it is appropriate for multi-dance events. If you’re doing a performance, you want something that matches the mood of your music and choreography, even if it’s very non-traditional.
Once you have an idea what you want, it’s time to shop around. If you’re not going to need the clothes more than once or twice, it may be cost-effective to rent them. There are many businesses that will rent a gown or Latin costume for around $100 a day (plus costs of cleaning, shipping, etc.) and many individual dancers will rent or even loan their clothing between events. If you’re going to be using it regularly, however, it may be worthwhile to invest in a garment of your own.
Another possibility is construction. As stated above, making dance clothing is a specialized skill, but many dancers end up going this route due to the enormous savings. According to people I have talked to, it takes five or six tries on average for an experienced sewer to make his or her first useable gown, but even with paying for material for that many gowns it is still much less than having one custom-made by a professional and the skills make construction of future garments much easier and cheaper. In fact, once this skill is developed it can quickly become a profitable sideline business!
Another option is to purchased used clothing. While used ballroom clothing ocassionaly appears on Ebay, most ballroom clothing retailors have a small sideline in used outfits, and dance networking sites such as www.dance-forums.com are filled with people who will often trade or sell costumes. This is a somewhat risky proposition in the ballroom world, as much clothing is custom made or tailored for the owner. Make sure such clothing has extra fabric attached so you can have it altered to fit your shape, but remember that even the best tailor is not a miracle worker. Ask if you can borrow the outfit first to have a tailor confirm whether it can be altered to suit your frame.
Finally, one can search out deals. Raibow Shiu is famous among many dancers for providing low-cost dance clothes. While they are rarely the best clothes, they have a great deal of quality for the price one pays. Most women professionals I know started out with a Rainbow Shiu gown before they were able to afford higher quality outfits.
