Commission Notes: Hamilton

Completed: February 2019

Hours Spent: 40-ish

Patterns Used:

Butterick 3072: Vest, Shirt, Pants
Smoke and Fire Revolutionary War Regimental Coat

Super Helpful Tutorials:

How I Made it:

Several of you have asked about the Hamilton costume I made for my friend, Ricardo, a while back so here ya go!

Initially, I dove headfirst into historical builds, primarily focusing my attention on Reconstructing History’s Revolutionary War pattern set. However, once I started reading up on the pattern notes and comparing the pieces to photos from the Broadway production, I quickly realized that the stage version of Hamilton’s uniform was much more modernized than I thought. After diving through several Hamilton builds, design notes from Paul Tazewell, and looking at reference shots, I settled on Smoke and Fire’s pattern for the coat and Butterick 3072 for the base pieces.

One of the trickier parts of this build was finding the right fabrics. I wanted to use something high quality and durable, but also not overly expensive. In the end, we settled on a synthetic twill for the coat, a delightful boiled wool for the fashion fabric, and a smoother wool for the jacket’s contrast pieces.

In terms of sewing, all of these patterns were quite straightforward. I only had to make minor fitting adjustments to the jacket and the cuff at the bottom of the pants. Those were a bit fussy, since going with elastic (a deviation from the pattern) made the pants higher than they were supposed to, which exposed my client’s leg, but neither of us cared for the cuff as patterned. We ultimately decided to go with a plain cuff on the leg.

Probably the most awkward part of working on this costume was the buttonholes. Originally I thought about getting fancy and doing bound buttonholes on the jacket, but the Broadway references indicated that the buttonholes were machine stitched, saving my sanity. I estimated that the buttonholes were roughly the width of two buttons, but I ran into an issue at this point: the buttonhole foot for my Brother SE400 only went up to 1 1/2″ instead of 2″, which made a very visible difference. Unfortunately, my backup machine, a Singer Stylist, was out of commission at this point in time, so I came up with an odd solution: overlapping buttonholes. I started on one end of the jacket, then had to flip it and carefully stitch another one which overlapped the first buttonhole. It required extra time and lots of marking to ensure accuracy, but it worked!

The final piece I made was the jabot. I went back and forth so many times on how to make this. Ricardo sent me refs that showed Lin Manuel Miranda’s was stitched directly onto his undershirt, but I wasn’t happy with my attempts at that. Instead, I settled on making an entirely separate piece (made from the same voile I used for the undershirt) that was stitched onto a gathered neck ruff that closed with velcro.

Thoughts on this build:

I was admittedly burned out on Hamilton when I started this build, but seeing Ricardo’s love for the source material and his excitement over being able to wear it made it worthwhile. He wore this suit to the touring production when it came through Dallas and the cast loved it! The reaction made my inner stage designer so happy.

I also made Hamilton’s green outfit for Ricardo last year as part of one of my class projects. I’m not going to do a whole separate blog post on it since the patterns were the same. I just used silk taffeta instead of wool and twill since Hamilton’s all about that money at by the time he’s in that outfit in the play.