Costume Notes: Swim Marianne von Edmund (Fire Emblem Heroes)

Completed: August 2023

Hours Spent: 25-30-ish

Debuted: Colossalcon Texas 2023

Why This Costume: Fire Emblem Heroes is a danger zone. Every time they drop a new alt for my favorite characters, I know I’m going to be in trouble and have to drop everything to make it! Marianne’s swim outfit was no exception, especially when my lovely friend Fauna Cosplay said they wanted to cosplay swim Hilda ❤

Purchased Pieces: 

• Parosol: Amazon
• Shoes: Amazon
• Belly chain: Amazon
• Hip brooch: Dangerous Ladies

Patterns Used: 

• Madalynne Intimates Maris Bra front + Barrett bra back
• Mood Fabrics Cordia swimsuit bottoms
• Happiest Camper Wrap Skirt

Super Helpful Tutorials: 

• Cosmic Coterie Haori Tutorial
• Marianne Wig Tutorial
• Bombshell Swimsuit Sewalong
• Spandex 101

How I Made it: 

This project wound up being more labor intensive than I expected, especially one that’s essentially a drinking outfit!

Since this outfit was made primarily to hang out in the adults-only swim-up bar, I wanted to keep costs minimal. I started with the cover pieces, pulling from fabrics in my stash. The bottom cover is made from about 1.5 yards of stretchy mystery twill and some ivory glitter satin using Happiest Camper’s Wrap Skirt (linked above) as a very loose guideline (I mostly used it for the waistband pieces). Once that was done, I made some vectors in Illustrator to create the gold trim and cut the pieces from scraps of Sportflex (thanks, cosplay, for enabling my hoarder tendencies).

The top cover piece is made from a lovely pale blue lace gifted to me from Lutavia Cosplay. I wanted to take advantage of the scalloped edges, so I cut it so the edges would make up the end of the sleeves as well as the bottom of the cover. The construction of this piece is a lot like a haori, but instead of lining it, I constructed everything with French seams.

The swimsuit proper is what gave me the most trouble, surprisingly enough! I used the front of Madalynne’s Maris bra for the swim top, adding foam to the cups for additional coverage. Originally, I planned to use more HTV to create the scalloped trim on the center front of the top, but I HATED how this looked. Thankfully, I had plenty of materials on hand to make more, so I painted my leftover lace gold with Jaquard paints and stitched that on instead. This led to more bulk than I would have liked, but it worked well enough for this wear.

The bottoms also gave me some trouble. The leg holes appear to be cut more like boy shorts, which is what I wanted, but when I tried them on initially, there were a lot of ugly wrinkles around the crotch. I didn’t want to trash the whole piece, so I re-cut the leg holes to a more full-coverage panty length, which yielded a much more flattering result. Not like you can see it with the cover, but it’s there!

To finish things off, I grabbed a belly chain and parasol from Amazon, a hip buckle from The Dangerous Ladies, and wore my Sua sandals!

Thoughts on this build:

Again, this costume gave me more trouble than I initially expected, but in the end, it was a fun outfit! There’s definitely elements I might revisit if/when I wear this again, but sometimes it’s nice to just have an excuse to throw something cute together to match friends and let go of perfectionism.