Mary Luke: Wardrobe Extraordinnaire

Mary is a long-term friend of mine from my college days.

We spoke recently about shooting and, being busy bunnies, we arranged them over two evenings rather than over the weekend.

Evening 1: Wednesday 19^th October, 7pm

Mary brought a small portion of her wardrobe to my house. This ‘small portion’ FILLED my house. There was the most MASSIVE suitcase I have ever seen in my entire life, being carried in by Mary (who is about the 3^rd of the size of said suitcase), a massive shoulder bag heaving with shoes, and then a further bag of shoes. And another box of shoes.

Now of course, this was totally my fault. As Mary said (repeatedly) “you didn’t specify!”. I had said, bring as much as you can carry. Fill a suitcase. Literally, as much as you can. My mistake. Sorry Mary. I didn’t realise that you owned one of every outfit ever made and that you happened to have a suitcase the size of the UK.

We got set up, chatting for a while and got Mary made up and into outfit one:

 

We had lots of awesome clothes to choose from. There were corsets and dresses and tights and trousers, chokers and shoes, the list goes on!


Outfit two was a bit more lacy and gothic and this was our best image:

And then, of course, because she can’t envisage a shoot now without her presence, Ceri “Look At Me” Williams turned up! Apparently, Mary invited her. A likely story indeed… >_>

And so Mary and I tried to carry on uninterrupted, which of course, was now proving difficult with Ceri jumping in front of the camera at every given opportunity and stomping her feet when she couldn’t have her own way.

She’s going to hate me when she reads this but it’s all true, look!:

Still, regardless of our unexpected Diva waltzing in and making us laugh uncontrollably, Mary and I got a good few shots to use from evening 1.


Here was outfit three. A Religion silver dress:

Then there was the black red and blue corset which was AWESOME:

The purple netted top, which was my personal favourite:

(Beware: too smexy for the naked eye.)

... and then there was actual nudity. Wa-hey!

We ended on that happy note. :)

Evening 2: Thursday 20^th October, 7pm

Disaster struck!

Unfortunately, everything went wrong on Evening 2. My car was at the garage being fixed and so I had got the train to work. Some pilchards on the M3 then decided to have a bit of a pile up and Basingstoke was a mess. I got out of work and got the train back to Basingstoke. I was picked up by Martin and then by the time we had fought through the traffic back to the garage, the service desk wasn’t open and so I couldn’t get my car. If I had got to the car, the shoot would have started very late anyway, but I was miffed.

Not as miffed as Mary must have been though as she had not got my messages due to driving to Farnborough to meet me there and got them when she arrived. Oh dear. Worse still… Mary had gotten me a present. And it was amazing (though I didn’t know that at the time). O_o


I obviously apologised profusely until her ears bled and we rescheduled Evening 2 to the following Tuesday. It did mean that I could start on the edits from Evening 1, though.

Evening 2B: Tuesday 25^th October, 7pm

Evening 2 was epic. I love the whole thing.


We started off punk-rock with big 80's hair and tassly bits. :D

And then we moved onto this pink gangster outfit that was, quite frankly, amazing!

Ain't she a character!?

 

And a beauty.

I love those. :D 

We did get a variety this time again with a lot of awesome outfits and things.


We had the awesome black lace parasol and dress:

This one is quite funny because, for those of you who don't know, Mary is pretty darn short (approximately 2ft tall ;D). For this one, as the skirt was so long, we stood her up on an upturned bin to get some height on the girl! Ha ha. I think it looked pretty cool though actually:

We had this wicked leather outfit:

Phwoar.

*Jelly Legs*

And then finally, we couldn't resist the inevitable Lolita outfit opportunity.

For those who don't know Mary, as I said, she's a bit of a short arse (sorry Mary, please don't bite my ankles), she's also obviously into her gothic stylings, however, she's also a fan of the ol' Lolita styling which she can really, truly get away with incredibly well due to her diddiness. That is a word. I just wrote it in the dictionary myself.

Now I have this giant teddy bear, Mister Ted (is there no end to my genius) that I won at Chessington (I know, is there anything I can't do, right?) and so with Mary literally looking like a little gothic doll and Mister Ted being as oversized as Mary is undersized... what a fookin' pair they made!

Observe:

HOW COOL IS THAT!?

As my avid fan, Adam Gould says, she looks like a little borrower! Awww. Can we keep her?

Anyways, amongst other things, Mary is also interested in Cosplay (eurgh) as is Ceri and so there may be some of that soon *shudder*.

Aside from that, doing these images in the evening kind of limited us to the studio due to lack of lighting but all those who would like to see more gothic Mary images on location, say 'aye'!

Must... buy... portable... battery... pack... for... lights...

... so... expensive...

*cries forever*

Goodnight Kids!