The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

Wang: I’m working on another book, but I don’t know how much I can talk about it. I wouldn’t want to go back to the story unless I have a very solid idea that I feel is worth making a sequel of it, but that just means I don’t really know.ĭunlap: Do you have anything that you’re working on right now? Wang: I don’t really have any current plans, but I’m open to inspiration striking. I think I would take inspiration and use it for the background characters and to give you the context of how freeing and how much more fun Frances’s dresses are.ĭunlap: Do you have any plans for a sequel so we can see what Frances and Sebastian are up to? The silhouettes of the time were very much a very small waist and big bustles, which I think are a thing that we are not really into now. I wanted to have that contrast with things that felt very of its time, maybe even stuffy. I wanted the outfits that Frances designs to feel very modern, to feel like things that you could wear now, or that a teenager now would think were cute. Wang: I would say that a lot of the research was to see what people were generally wearing at the time. That was actually really fun.ĭunlap: Are dresses in the book are inspired by historical outfits? You could search by the decade and you could break it down by hats, shoes, buttons and just really specific things. There were a lot of Instagrams and a lot of Pinterests that collect scans and photographs and outfits from very specifically that late-19th century period.

There are a lot of people who are very, very specific about different eras. I spent a lot of time looking through resources for historical costuming nerds.

I have tried, but I think I’m too sloppy to really be a good seamstress. I like looking at it, but I don’t know how to sew. Wang: I’m generally interested in fashion. I combined it with a couple other ideas I had, a fairy tale and a queer concept that I felt would be really fun to do and would also be something that I could make for a 14-year-old version of myself.ĭunlap: Was fashion an interest that you had, too, or was that something that you had to research for the story? I wanted to do something for a while that was something like that, but just more relevant to what I was thinking about now, something that I felt like would be more engaging to me now. I think my earliest inspirations for drawing were watching Disney movies and 90s-era Disney cartoons. Dunlap: Were Disney princesses the inspiration for The Prince and the Dressmaker?

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang