Today, I’m super excited to share with you how we tackled costumes for Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Working with limited resources and some short deadlines, I think we nailed all the outfits for this musical version of the classic tale.
Links in this post may be affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you make a purchase from any of them, at no additional cost to you. You can find out more information by reading my full disclaimer.
Disney’s The Little Mermaid is an extremely popular musical to produce at the school level. MTI offers both a full version and a junior show to accommodate most ability levels. Between the flexible cast size and the ability to cast any gender in most roles, this show is great for most schools. Plus the familiar songs and name recognition make it an easy sell to the community.
One of the biggest challenges of this show comes when you start working on sets and costumes. Creating a believable undersea world can be difficult for even the most creative designers. And the costumes! That can be another story all together!
The Little Mermaid Costumes
When our school produced The Little Mermaid, I volunteered to to coordinate costumes. I worked with the director and a student designer to come up with the best version costumes we could for the show on a very limited public school budget. I’m really excited to share with you how we created what we felt like were some pretty amazing costumes.
Our Mermaids
One of the first challenges we faced when addressing the costumes for The Little Mermaid was actually the mermaids. We wanted a uniform look for the characters, but we were concerned about modesty. Several of our cast members were worried about the traditional bra top and midriff bearing costume. Any time I create costumes, one of my main goals is to make sure the actor feels confident in what they’re wearing so they can give the best performance possible. Because of the concerns about too much skin, we went with a more modest look for the mermaids.
After doing some research and talking to our choreographer, we decided to go with a sleeveless fitted top and a basic long straight skirt. To the skirt we added layers in gradient colors, finished off with tulle at the bottom to give the illusion of a fish tail. We choses a signature color for each mermaid, with the exception of Ariel, where we went with the traditional purple top and green tail.
For the skirt, I used a pencil skirt pattern from the website Tiana’s Closet, which has lots of great resources. I adjusted the bottom by adding points in the front and the back to help the illusion of the tail. I added my own layers of 6 inch wide fabric overlapping in a V shape. I then added tulle to the bottom to create the final fin.
The tops were made from a renaissance dress set pattern from Nova Pattern on Etsy, and were specifically sewn to size for each actor. I actually was able to use this pattern again to make Ariel’s day dress for the Kiss The Girl scene. I simply chose colors to match the cartoon as closely as I could and made all the pieces included in the set.
For what we called “the shipwreck dress” for the scenes where Ariel is washed up on shore, we made a simple shift, and draped extra fabric and rope around it to create the illusion of it being wrapped around our actor. The back opened fully so she could do an onstage quick change for the end of Act One.
For her ballgown, we had big plans to use something we found in our costume closet. It was a dress from the 80s that was the perfect puff sleeve style to match the movie. It just needed the skirt widened a bit to accommodate the dancing. But unfortunately, we could not find fabric fabric that matched well enough to make this adjustment. With little time to spare, the only dress that would arrive in time was a lovely, simple Regency style gown. We added a pink sash to give a nod to the original color of her ball gown in the movies. It ended up working beautifully, especially in the dance scenes.
For the iconic hair for Ariel, we got really lucky. We bought a red wig from Amazon, and with proper styling and care, it worked beautifully for the whole show!
The Ursula Costume
Ursula is usually the most difficult creation for any set of Little Mermaid Costumes. We got also extremely lucky and found a formal gown in our costume closet that was perfect to add tentacles too. It was fairly similar to this dress from Amazon. It originally had some pretty ornate embroidery that I removed from the bodice and skirt. Then I made tentacles using pattern I drew freehand. I used a purple/pink fabric with a sheer purple/green overlay that ended up matching the bodice perfectly. I stuffed each tentacle with PolyFil and sewed them each to the dress by hand.
I made two of the eight tentacles a bit longer, then attached them to wrist cuffs using fishing line, so they would move and gesture with Ursula. I also added a neck strap to help hold the dress in place on our actor, since the tentacles added significant weight to the dress itself. We finished it off with a pale purple long sleeve shirt under the dress that we color matched with make up to create Ursula’s pale purple skin. The wig was donated, but was very similar to this Ursula wig from Amazon.
Our Sebastian Costume
For Sebastian, we did a larger departure from a depiction of a crab. We had a female actor playing Sebastian, so we purchased a red women’s business suit similar to this one from Amazon. A volunteer added rhinestones to the entire outfit to give it some texture and definition. She glued them all on, but I much prefer to use a hot fix tool when adding rhinestones to fabric. I find it to be faster and more secure. We added a headband with a tiny top hat and goggly eyes to finish the look. It’s hard to see in the photos how sparkly this costume actually was, but trust me, it was pretty fantastic.
Prince Eric
Our Prince Eric costume was put together with a few basic pieces. We ordered a pirate style shirt from Amazon, and found some great, navy blue Walter Hagan wrinkle free golf pants at the thrift store that worked beautifully with this. We hand crafted a cummerbund from some red material we bought from Hobby Lobby. For the final wedding scene, we found half of this prince costume in our costume storage, and he was able to throw it on over his other costume in just seconds. It actually looked very nice on stage!
Flounder’s Costume
Flounder proved to be a bit more challenging. Finding something to suggest the traditional blue and yellow fish, while still making it easy to wear and dance in. We went with these yellow overalls from Amazon with this royal blue long sleeve top underneath it. We removed the front pocket and added matching blue fabric to the sides to create Flounder’s stripes. We also purchased this blue wig for our actor. I think the look came together very well.
The Seagulls
One of the most overlooked, but important Little Mermaid costumes is the seagulls! For our seagulls, we really felt like feathers were important. So we took long sleeve white t-shirts and added fabric “wings” to them. The wings were created by cutting feather shapes into black, gray and white fabric and sewing them in a gradient pattern onto a wing shape. The wing shapes were then attached to the arms of long sleeve t-shirts. The front pieces of a vest pattern were then added to the t-shirts with oversized buttons. We added extra feathers to the neckline area of the shirt so they would peak out of the vest. We used white sweatpants for the bottoms and cut feather shapes at about the knee area. We put the actors in orange knee socks from Amazon. We created hats by painting the bills of white baseball hats orange and adding pieces of a white feather boa to the top. For Scuttle himself, we wanted to distinguish him from the other seagulls, so we ordered this aviator hat set that came with a white scarf as well. We added pieces of the white boa to this hat too.
Flotsam & Jetsam Costumes
For our electric eels, Flotsam and Jetsam, we went a very unconventional route. We decided since they’re Ursula’s henchmen, that we would order suits and add fins to them. We wanted to add a light up element, but ended up having to abandon those plans due to time constraints. We ordered green velvet suits from Amazon that had a little shine to them, and added iridescent ruffles for the fins that we added to both arms and legs. We also created a headpiece for each actor out of the ruffle.
Chef Louis
For Chef Louis, we went with a classic chef look. We ordered all pieces from Amazon: a chef’s hat, checkered pants and a chef’s coat. It came together well for an easy quick change for the actor, and looked great on stage.
Water Costumes
Water is an extremely important part of this show. Having the right costumes for water can accommodate most Ariel’s quick changes on stage. We used these blue Isis wings usually used for belly dancing, along with long blue dresses to create these costumes. The wings were perfect to circle around Ariel while she “lost her tail.” The effect worked beautifully.
The Sea Creatures
Due to some unforeseen issues, our sea creature costumes didn’t quite come together the way we had originally planned. With just a few days left before opening night, we scrambled to put together some semblance of costumes for our sea creatures. We went with bright solid colors of long sleeve shirts and pants or leggings. We also created what we called some additional texture and movement by making belts that had ruffles hanging off of them. We created these flounce style ruffles by cutting spirals into bright colors of fabric and then sewing the spirals onto the “belt.” We tied these around the kids waists. We also created fin headbands using tulle and hot glue. You can see one in action in the background of the Sebastian picture.
Little Mermaid Costumes: Final Thoughts
This project was a lot of fun to put together. The kids were all happy with their costumes and I feel like we kept a lot of the spirit of the original show. Hope what we did can inspire your production of The Little Mermaid.
Looking for other costumes? Check out this Head In A Jar Tutorial