Shaun Leane:
I was in an apprenticeship, he’d just come out of college. We had to work with the materials that we could, funds were scarce, but design and ideas and innovation weren’t. So what we did was we put all our ideas and used what had which was: craft, design, innovation, bravery. We put those elements and used materials that we could. So in the early days it was silver and I worked in brass and aluminium to create the things we did. Every piece had its own secret little mechanism of how it was attached to the girl. For example, the moon headdress was basically shaped in the moon crescent and there’s a section missing, but it had a bar around the back which literally just clipped to the back of the girl’s neck. If you remember when you were a kid in those joke shops you had a nail that went through your hand and you had a little bar that went round there. It was the same simple idea but it was just around the neck. With a lot of these pieces there was a weight to them so I had to work very closely with the hairdressers on set because sometimes we had to plait the girls’ hair so that we could pin through the plait so that the pieces would stay in position. Everything we did was never straightforward, it was never simple. Some of the things that we created visually were breath-taking but it wasn’t just the product I’d created, it was the optical illusion – how we got these pieces onto the girl and kept them on to the model throughout the whole show. It created the illusion and the whole look and the grandeur of that presence I suppose.