For this costuming design project I wanted to base a costume on winter folklore or phenomena.
I broke the stories or things I thought of by category as best I could so that I could think of what would be workable or something to research further for stories later depending on what I felt would be the right choice.

In the end, I ended up thinking of a winter folklore that interests me a lot. The folklore behind the northern lights.
Because this phenomenon is seen in a lot of different countries, with a different spectrum of colours depending on the location - there is a lot of different interpretations of what it stands for and the stories it connects with.
I also wrote down a list of general associations based on these stories as well as my own.

After this, I did performance type/prop research because I already had an idea of the sort of performance I wanted to gravitate towards. I looked at companies who I had seen a show or several shows from before, and found out there is a lot of crossover between fire performers, and led/flow performers. Including the companies you can hire them through for events and stuff sometimes having overlap in performers as well.

After the concepting and the performance research I was sat with a problem. Both led light performance and fire performance would be a good fit for the concept of the northern lights.
It was really a fight between aesthetic/association and spectacle/the unexpected.
After some sparring i ended up with a few key things to keep in mind as I started designing

This is the first draft of my costume.
I wanted to mainly have a lot of asymmetry and flowing shapes to match the idea I had of what shape language fits the northern lights.
I wanted to seperare the masculine clothing more by having more rigid shapes to emulate the landscape or ice, but the chest piece for the model on the right was clearly too jagged and straight on so I practically changed it right after this, I just knew that fabric alone on the chest piece felt too bare and didn't quite know how I wanted to fix it yet.
The pants I knew were going in the right direction though.
I also knew right off the bat I was going to do everything to build the design of the right around the corset piece, because I knew I really liked how it looked and where it was at.
I did make notes about the facts I really wanted the bottom pieces at the very least mimic the colours of the northern lights.

After asking a classmate for some feedback, we came to the idea of pants with a slit or a sort of cut open design, to make it look like it has more volume while not really needing to accommodate for any sort of wider pants than this.

From here I was relatively satisfied, so I decided to try some colour pallets.
I realized the moment I put down the red in the green one that it looked like a fruit or something instead of the northern lights. The other one was fine but I wasn't quite happy with the fact it just looked like an ice-based gradient.

I leaned back into something less even with a sort of cowboy pant style look for the masculine costume. I also wanted to try a different style of sleeve, because I felt like changing the pants meant there was too little dark blue present in the design now, and also widened the gap for the chest for the same reason. 
The new draft on the right feels more even, and like the top and bottom half get a roughly equal amount of dark blue, or at least close enough that it works out well.

I took the sleeves from the discarded draft though, and added those onto the female costume. I also added slits to the side of a skirt to match the other design better.

I knew I wanted to add some sort of detailing to the corset and the chest piece as well. I knew a sparkly element could strengthen the concepts of light and ice. I found a nice set of sew on gems that looked to match the colour of the costume, mainly the greens and blues of it. I placed them onto the pieces in a pattern like a snowflake of sorts.

After that, i decided that the costumes didn't feel complete without some hair and shoes. I kept them really simple because I want the main costume and shapes of it to be the focus.

I ordered the fabrics after this. The main fabrics are all viscose, and the dark blue used for the costume is a cotton. The belts and such are the light blue fake leather on the left.
I also ordered the gems, and nicely enough the gems had a purple colour when shining in the light as well, which was a really nice coincidence considering I had that purple in my costume too.