I've been working on some costume designs for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The concept is based on the fact that, if you analyse the play at all closely, there is no damned concept of time or place! Ancient Greek people, Shakespeare's English people, timeless fairy people running around the woods in two or maybe three days sometime in May, or June, or April. Like every bad action movie every made, time means absolutely nothing in this play.
Taking that concept and running with it, every character is influenced by a different time period. Helena, for example, is our little goth girl, whereas Theseus is a Samauri. I'm having some trouble with the fairy world. I don't really want to do Puck as a Harlequin, and I don't really want to do Titania as an Egyptian queen, but I'm running out of ideas.
Right now I'm trying to decide whether the costumes should BE these periods, or only influenced a little bit by them. For example, do we want a Flapper Fairy, or a fairy in a short finged skirt with bobbed hair? Do we want Hippolyta in 17th Century French court dress, or do we want her in a wide, patterned slightly lucious dress?
At the same time, I also want to carry the Apollo/Artemis referances. The three most common weird-ass words in that script are related to archers, the moon, and love. Apollo was the archer god, and the god of prophecy and music. His twin sister Artemis was goddess of the moon, the forest, and a protector of virgins. Apollo is also mixed up in a couple of myths involving snakes and giving someone donkey ears.
Doesn't that just scream Midsummer?