PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEVE PARKE
When, at 16, costumer Miriam Reyna showed up to the Maryland Renaissance Festival transformed into a magnificent fairy—in the first complex costume she’d made herself—she was approached by so many people dazzled by the vision before them that she started to think she might be onto something. She kept making costumes. She was a shy, anxious kid, she says, but her creations helped her morph into someone “magical and confident and proud.” Now 25, she loves making fairgoers stop in their tracks—by becoming something they’ve never seen before. Her most recent transformation? She became a stone castle, replete with glowing stained-glass windows.
She was inspired by the stained-glass windows she saw while traveling, and drew up plans for a full gown fabricated from “stained glass”… but then Oscar de la Renta did it before she could. So she pivoted, deciding to create “an old stone castle dress, with characters telling a story through window panels.” These characters might as well be her BFFs, she thought, and it just so happened that she and her friends had recently dressed up as the Faerie Court of Seasons. So she staged the four of them with their hands intertwined, dancing in a forest of trees, for the dress’s painted design.
To construct the castle gown, she figured out how to make a stack of realistic-looking miniature stone bricks by salvaging some thick foam mats from her climbing gym, cutting them up into many, many rectangles, beveling their edges, and painting and dry-brushing them to be a sufficiently weathered gray. For the windows, she used laser-cut acrylic sheets, drawing drafts for the window panels to scale, then tracing them into vector lines in Illustrator and painted portraits of her friends (one as each season) using a laser cutter at a local maker space to cut out hundreds of pieces. She taped the panels together on their fronts and painted each piece with acrylic paint on the back.
Meanwhile, her mother sewed a plain white top and skirt to fit snugly around a hoop skirt. She added a backpack-style waist strap and buckle to help distribute the weight of the acrylic that Miriam then superglued to the skirt. With all the panels adhered to dress, She filled in the small gap between each panel with black paint to achieve a soldered look. From there she glued the bricks around each window, topping them off with dried moss for an aged effect. And last but not least? She made herself a turret crown.
See more of Miriam’s work at miriamreynadesigns.com or follow her on Instagram @miriam.reyna. Follow Steve Parke at steveparke.com.
