Costume designer makes sure Renaissance dresses fit for a queen

Kettering designer has created Renaissance Festival costumes for decades


How to Go:

What: Ohio Renaissance Festival

When: 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Oct. 25. Rain or shine.

Where: 10542 State Route 73. South I-75 to Exit 38 (Springboro/Franklin), 15 miles East on State Route 73 OR take State Route 48 to State Route 73 East.

Tickets: Adults and children 13 and older, $21.95; Children 5-12, $9.95. Discounts available online or at Kroger.

Also: Ohio Renaissance Festival Shops sell and rent costumes. This is Highland Weekend which features pipes and drums of Albannach, Highland Games competition, the Cincinnati Caledonian Society Pipe Band, and a Tartan Parade.

For information: www.renfestival.com

When Queen Elizabeth makes her way through the Ohio Renaissance Festival crowds each day, she invariably gets compliments on her ornate gown.

“I always tell them my dressmaker is a genius!” said Connie Pfeiffer, who portrays the English royal at the popular summer event.

That genius is Johnna Brough of Kettering who’s been the costume director at the popular summer festival for the past eight seasons. Brough’s job entails overseeing the costumes for a cast of 60, helping others design and make their own garb, and fashioning a variety of other garments. In addition, she currently works for the festival itself — designing this year’s new front gate costumes as well as the banners and draping that decorate the 30-acre site.

It’s painstaking work. Each of the queen’s gowns alone, said Brough, takes more than 120 hours to create.

“Johnna amazes me with her creativity, precision, and the attention to detail she puts into the Queen Elizabeth dresses, as well as the joy I see in her eyes when I wear them and she sees it all together,” Pfeiffer said. “It honors me to get to wear the beautiful garments she has so lovingly created!”

When the first dress debuted, Brough told the queen that she didn’t so much make the dress as “give birth” to it, and the hours she put into designing, beading, trimming, repairing and maintaining it were very much like the love and devotion one gives to birthing and parenting a child.

“When she wanted to add to it, or would need to repair it or have it cleaned, we’d say she ‘got custody’ of it,” Pfeiffer said. “And as a child does, it grows. She added sleeves, and beads and snoods (hair coverings) — all bejeweled, intricate and tough because I really am so hard on my garments.”

Wear and tear

As the queen, Pfeiffer said she is always on the move. “The dresses have held up to being caught in wheelchair wheels, stepped on, kneeled in, whirled around in dances,” she said. “And they still look lovely! Johnna hand-sewed each of the jewels and crystals on the dress in such a way that if one bead was lost none of the other beads moved.”

“Each time what she put on me was right on the money — correct length, symmetrical, and progressively more beautiful,” said Pfeiffer.

Costumes add realism

Dave Smith, entertainment director for the Ohio Renaissance Festival said it’s Johnna Brough’s attention to detail that makes her work so special. “And her costumes last,” said Smith who is also a performer. “It’s one thing to have a stage costume that you only wear for an hour, but we live in ours and they are all-weather.”

Though most performers are responsible for their own costumes, Smith said it would be exorbitantly expensive for actors to purchase the more elaborate ones. The festival buys and owns those.

A good costumer, Smith said, has to be an historian. Braugh’s designs for Queen Elizabeth, for example, always begin with historic paintings of the Queen and what she is wearing.

“Costumes add believability and realism to the event,” Smith explained .”They are very authentic. The base layer of clothing can be modern just for comfort, but everything outside of that is as authentic as we can make it. The queen, for example, wears eight different layers including an underskirt, overskirt, a bum roll, bloomers and stockings. And that’s just her lower half!”

There are both traveling and local performers in the Ohio festival cast. In addition to major players such as the queen and Sir Walter Raleigh, there are peasants, farmers, merchants.

“Each one has a different costume they were allowed to wear at that period of time,” said Smith. “There was actually a law called ‘sumptuary,’ it restricted what you could wear depending on your class. Only the queen, for example, could wear purple.”

Sewing her first costume

As a child growing up in Miamisburg, Brough’s love for performing was rivaled only by her love of playing dress-up. She started performing in talent shows and community theater at the age of 8.

At 15, she first visited the Ohio Renaissance Festival and fell in love. The following year — 1994 — she auditioned and joined the cast.

“Suddenly here was a way to combine my love of performance, dress-up, and history!” Brough said. When she realized she was responsible for coming up with her own costume, she turned to her mother — a seamstress who had previously made Revolutionary War costumes — and her grandmother. Together the three generations of women tackled Brough’s first costume.

“Other than a few craft and Girl Scout projects before, I hadn’t ever sewn much, so this was quite the learning experience,” Brough said. ” Back then, I didn’t have access to good patterns or research, so we had to make it up as we went along. I come from several generations of seamstresses, so this started to come very naturally to me. In fact, I still use my grea- grandmother’s dress form from the 1920’s in my creations today.”

When it was time for college, Brough headed for Ohio State University where she majored in Medieval & Renaissance Studies with a minor in theater. By the time she took some costuming classes, she was already heavily into sewing and designing her own garments. Her mother continued to be her sewing partner. On weekends Brough would drive back to Miamisburg from Columbus so she and her mom could make costumes for the Renaissance Festival late into the night.

After college, Brough took to the road, performing as a sword-fighter at over 30 different Renaissance festivals across the country. As a source of extra income, she began making and wearing her own costumes which garnered both attention and orders. Eventually she left stage combat in order to focus on designing costumes, but still performs locally with “Wenches a’ Wailing,” an act she’s been staging with her sister-law, Jennifer Brough, for the past 17 years. Johnna’s brother, Charley Brough, and her nephews, Chance and Johnny Brough, all work at the Ohio Renaissance Festival also.

“I design and draft all my own patterns, Brough said. “My super power is my ability to recreate anything from a picture or portrait. My mother and grandmother taught me sewing basics, but everything else I’ve learned through extensive research and trial, and error.”

Brough’s sewing workshop in West Carrollton is called “A Thimble in Time.” While the Renaissance Festival keeps her busy from April-November, the rest of the year she accepts commissions from area and online clients. She’s made costumes for over 100 festivals and events and shipped them to nearly two dozen different countries. Although her specialty is Renaissance Festival costumes, she created Greco-Roman, Medieval, Early American, Victorian, and Fantasy costumes, including Cosplay. (Costume play). “If you can point me to a picture of it, I can make it,” she said.

Braugh, who still regularly collaborates with her mother, lives with her husband, Andy, and her 10-year-old daughter, Lilia. There’s a baby due in December. In the meantime, said Brough: “My mom and I are currently teaching Lilia how to sew.”

Johnna Brough’s workshop, “A Thimble in Time, ” is located at 22 N. Elm St., West Carrollton. Hours are by appointment only. She can be reached at thimbleintime@gmail.com

About the Author