Her Universe Fashion Show 2024 – Vogue 9673 Jacket – Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots

I’ve got a back log of pieces to post about and take pictures of but I’ve been procrastinating because, well, I’d rather make more stuff. However, I’m going to pause for now and tell you about the look that I most recently finished for the 2024 Her Universe Fashion Show, a look inspired by the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots! There are three big pieces to it — the jacket, the pants, the camisole/accessores and the embellishments — so I’m going to break it into 4 parts. But I promise it won’t take me as long to get these out as it did with the look from last year!

This year’s show was sponsored by Mattel. Since I won last year, I was invited to be a judge this year. My co-winner Raeven K. and I decided that we wanted to coordinate our looks as judges this year and when we perused the list of Mattel properties, the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots immediately stood out to us as an awesome duo. Given their giant biceps and bodies, we also both immediately went to power suits and then it took off from there.

We were kinda taking an 80’s bent on the power suit look. Think Working Girl with Melanie Griffith or classic 80’s Armani. Suits with mile high shoulder pads. But we wanted to pull out other details from the robots like the little collar or the peplum of the armor. The rivets we would cover with embellishment.

The first step was to get a base pattern. Both of us would normally draft our own, but since we wanted to match and we were separated by half a continent, we decided to find a base pattern in the big 4 to work from so that we were both effectively doing the same thing, obviously fitted to our own bodies. I found Vogue 9673, a vintage 80’s Vogue pattern which had the shape we were looking for, particularly with the peplum and wide shoulders that was relatively easy to acquire on Etsy. It had the foundation and we could modify the arm shape and add a collar.

First step was a muslin. As part of the muslin, I converted the sleeve to a mutton sleeve with a giant sleeve head. This was a pretty standard pattern manipulation, but it was one that I didn’t get to do in my flat pattern class so it was a lot of fun to do with a real application!

I also drafted a small collar which reflected that of the robots (yes, I accidentally put a seam allowance on center but fixed it when I actually made it). I took pictures of both of these on my cutting mat which has a 1/2” grid and sent them to Raeven who was then able to print them out herself, saving her the time of doing those pattern manipulations herself.

I was a little skeptical/nervous because I’ve never made a pants suit, but after the muslin I really started to get excited.

I was quite happy with both the fit and the look! It was going to be out there, but in a good way. And yes, I needed 3 layers of shoulder pads to get the look I wanted.

At this point in the process, Raeven and I were also trying to figure out fabrics. We originally planned to do a brocade, but unfortunately the ones we wanted from Mood Fabrics weren’t in stock in both the red and blue shades that we wanted. We also considered velvet but we couldn’t get the embossing to be bold enough and was such a delicate process that I was nervous about not making it look like a hot mess.

Stretch taffeta was on the table for a bit but just wasn’t interesting enough for stage and I wasn’t really a fan after making a muslin of the pants (that’ll be in the next post).

I got some samples from Kiki Textiles where I had ordered before and they had the perfect fabric. It was a glitter lurex in just the right colors (turquoise and red).

The reason it was perfect was that not only was it stretch which meant we could make the pants comfy, but it also pressed beautifully and took reasonably high heat meaning we could interface it to make it like a woven for the jacket (see the tests above). Additionally, it was sparkly enough to catch the stage lights, but not so much that our embellishments would get lost in it as they might have with some of the brocades.

Then it was just time to make it happen. I started by cutting out all the pieces from the fashion fabric and the interfacing which was a heavy weight weft woven tailoring interfacing.

For the lining, I had also purchased some yellow satin from Kiki Textiles. I actually purchased 2 types. One that was slightly stretchy and one that was not. The stretch one actually had very little stretch, so I could treat it like a normal woven. But even that little bit of give was nice since I wasn’t adding a back pleat. The stretch one was also a much nicer, silkier satin than the non-stretch so that’s what I went with. You can see it’s a bit warmer in color. I did end up using the non-stretch for my camisole underneath though since it matched my shoes better and those would be visible whereas the lining would not.

The actual construction went together pretty logically. Nothing major to share. At least until I got to the shoulder pads. In order to fill out the shoulders appropriately, I needed THREE layers of shoulder pads.

Plus, I added a gather layer of horsehair braid and a gathered layer of tulle inside the sleeve head to fill it out. You might recall that I had plenty of red horsehair and tulle leftover from last year. Sadly, I did not get a photo of the stuff to pump up the shoulders (I’m honestly not sure given all the other photos), but I do have the photo while I was trying to figure out what look I wanted and comparing different “poof” techniques. I ultimately ended up going for something in between the two above by attaching the horsehair and tulle facing upwards rather than sticking out perpendicular to my body.

Next we have some random photos from the construction of the jacket.

Grading seams. You can also see here where I used a lighter interfacing to make the facing non-stretch (left marled looking one) than on the rest of the jacket (right even looking one).

 

And even more grading at the collar where I had to grade at least 4 layers, more at the seams.

When it came to the lining, Raeven and I constructed our jackets slightly differently. The pattern is actually designed to be unlined so she did a very cool fusing method to get satin lining on the inside, essentially creating a double sided fabric with the fashion fabric on one side and the lining on the other and then doing basically flat felled seams. I chose to go with my tried and true method of a bagged lining because I had so many shoulder pads in there and wanted to hide that easily. Above is a detail shot. I was really happy with how clean it looked where it met the facing.

The lining was the last thing I sewed up because I wanted to sew on all the embellishments while having access to the inside. Above is another detail shot. This one is of the thread chains I put at the armpits to keep the lining in place while still allowing movement. I won’t go into too much detail about the lining since its construction was pretty standard, but there are 2 items of interest. 

The first was that I used the normal, non-mutton version of the sleeve for the lining of the sleeve. Credit here goes to Raeven for the idea and it worked really well! It gave plenty of space for all the tulle and horsehair but meant I didn’t need to feel any of the itches. 

Second, the jacket has a 2 inch hem. So when I pressed that up, I actually put fusible tape down in the crease. Then I sewed the lining to the top edge of the hem which still had plenty of space to manipulate. This mean that the hem didn’t try to pop out at all and gave a very nice crisp line. I did this for the sleeves as well. Really happy with how clean it looked and I will definitely use that technique again!

Finally, finishing touches. For the jacket button, there is a decorative Mattel button. I actually laser cut acrylic, sewed a regular button and then glued the acrylic to the regular button.

For the functional closure, I used a whopper popper junior snap on the inside and then did a hook and bar trouser closure (because they’re beefier than normal hook and eyes) for the outer one so that it would be minimally visible when I decided to open the jacket — and I did quite a bit because it was warm back stage!

Backtracking construction timeline-wise a bit to talk about embellishments. The sleeve decoration was actually applied before I sewed up the final lining. I believe I had the neck attached, but not the hem so that I could still reach in and sew the bezels down without visible stitching or catching the other side of the sleeve accidentally.

The sleeve embellishments were inspired by the screw, rivets and ridges no the side of the robot and I played around with some configurations before settling on the final alignment. The middle strip was this rhinestone tape that was supposed to be hot fix, but I could not get it to hot fix, no matter how long and how hot I pressed on it. I actually ended up melting the right two bezels while trying and had to re-sew them which was super annoying when I thought I was done. 

This was the final configuration I ended up with. I pointed the edges of the rhinestone tape because it was just too boring/awkward with it flat across and rounding it was hard to cut evenly. The bezels were all sewn down and a few them (like the big on top for the screw) were reinforced with glue later. I’ll talk more about the bezels themselves in my post about all the 3D printing I did for this Comic Con overall.

That’s about it for the jacket. I wish I had been slightly less stressed for time, because this was a lot of fun! I’ve never made such an exaggerated shape for a garment, let alone a tailored one, and it was an enjoyable challenge. I definitely want to try more! I’m super pleased with the quality of the jacket and the fit in the end. I only wish I had somewhere else to wear it!

I’ll talk more about the embellishments in one of the next posts where I’ll discuss the 3D modeling and printing I did for this look (there was a lot). In the meantime, here’s a pic from the show when Raeven and I walked out holding the boxing champion belt that we made to highlight the “boxing” part of our look.