Co.Design | business + design" Why is figure skating the most popular sport of the Winter Olympics? Sure, it's partly because skaters seem to defy physics with their gorgeous arabesques and butterfly jumps. But it's also because of the outrageous costumes. In sequin-bedazzled spandex, skaters use creative costume design to fuse sports with showbiz.
4 comments:
I've wondered why ice skating costumes are often so ugly. There are some genuinely beautiful costumes in this article, but some pretty terrible ones too.Especially for the first costume- who would ever put sequins in a pattern like that and think it was a good idea? How do you even get to be an ice skating costume designer? I wonder why the general aesthetic for ice skating costumes is crazy over the top colors and oddly placed sequins. It's its whole own segment of design, and it seems different from any other kind of design.
Haha, I like what Sarah just told me. First there's the designer, then there are the people at the fabric store, then there are the people constructing the costume... SOMEBODY ALONG THE WAY COULD HAVE SAVED THEM AND NOBODY DID! Some of the costumes are stunning. Julia Lipnitskaia's is stunning. But then you have the one like the Pink Panther outfit... The two pinks don't even go together. And it's not that great of a pink. Everything about the entire costume was wrong and no one did anything about it. Ice skating is so beautiful, it's just a shame. There are so many designs one could make for the costumes that would be spectacular... not ridiculous...
I agree with what both Sarah and Becki said, that its actually genuinely surprising and somewhat confusing that there are so many figure skating costumes that seem to be in such bad taste. Given the grand scale of the the Olympics, why isn't there more attention given to the appearance of the skaters? And there must have been some kind of process that went into making the costumes, somewhere along the way of which there should have been someone who noticed that the design was less than pleasing. There are definitely a lot of beautiful possibilities for something like this, as evidenced by the better costumes, and it's really too bad that they aren't being utilized.
Like Sarah and Becki, I'm kind of confused as to how anyone thought that some of these costumes were a good idea. Who designs them? I'm assuming each country' Olympic teams pick a designer, or maybe the athletes themselves have designers that they usually work with? Either way, it seems like such a funny niche job, where everything should be sparkly!
I think that the costumes should be simple, because in the end it's about the athlete's performance. I also just don't like very charged designs. I think my favorite is the one with the stripes, very playful and original.
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