Ask any Doctor Who cosplayer and they will go on and on about how hard it is to find the Tenth Doctor’s trademark suit fabric. Dark brown with tealy-blue pinstripe, the outfit was originally based off a pair of Gap pants the costumer thought were perfect and had matching fabric commissioned. Needless to say, finding appropriate fabric from which to sew your perfect Ten suit without scouring eBay for months for every single pair of those Gap pants you can find and then carefully cutting your jacket from them is difficult. For a while Joanns had a linen blend that was, while not perfect, a passable potting soil brown with turquoise stripe. People set up charts and maps of stores that still had the fabric in stock. It is long since gone.
In a theme for my life, I don’t remember how or why it came up, but at some point I offered to make a friend of mine a Ten suit if I ever found appropriate fabric. Possibly because I like dressing up, didn’t want to alone, pestered her until she agreed, and a female version of Ten was something she would accept doing as it was neither too obvious nor too weird. A suit is a suit and it could be worn as workplace wear with the added benefit of stealth geekery.
Finding the fabric was a big if though, so I didn’t expect too much of it. There are places that offer accurate reproductions of the fabric, right down to dye color, stripe width, and fiber content and weave. They’re about $60 a yard. Costuming can be a serious hobby. I wasn’t going to go that far.
Some time last December, I was in Britex Fabrics (oh frabjous day!) for something with the idea in the back of my head that I would keep an eye out for brown fabric with thin blue stripes. I wasn’t expecting much. Ha. I was wandering through the third floor when I turned around and there it was. Brown suiting fabric with blue pinstripes. It’s not a perfect match for the original. It’s not cotton sateen, the stripes are much thinner, woven rather than printed, in a different pattern and width, and the colors are a bit different. The brown is darker and the blue has a bit more green.
I didn’t care. I called her, thankful that she picked up in spite of being at work, and excitedly announced that I found It. I had found Ten fabric. I needed her permission to buy, on the agreement that she would pay me back, and was granted it. I purchased four and a half yards.
The fabric I found is really, really classy. It has a beautiful drape and I love the stripe pattern. It’s much more suit-like. Besides, I wasn’t going for a screen-accurate reproduction. I was doing an interpretation. This was going to be a woman’s suit, not a man’s suit for a woman. Genderswap, not crossplay.
It took a while to chose a pattern to use, partly because I am picky and partly because my friend was no help. I was making her a Ten!suit, that was more than enough to make her happy; opinions on style and cut and the like were not forthcoming. I eventually remembered that I had a Simplicity pattern of a retro 1940s woman’s suit that had all the details I wanted. It had vertical princess seams, rounded rather than pointed lapels, a neater fit, and two-piece sleeves. I suggested that pattern to her and then the opinion came in: that it was PERFECT.
Thus, an epic costume was begun. I even have enough fabric to make a matching fedora. 😀
I have this pattern, Vintage Vogue 2858, that I love and has been sitting in my pattern drawer since it went out of print. Like, oh, 2008? It is beautiful, but so far remains unused.
