👉 costume ideas for the figure skating au pls,,, either for singles or doubles 🥺

i got this a while back (sorry!!) and realized i hadn’t really thought much about Costume Ideas, and found that googling “figure skating costumes” almost exclusively brought up female skaters and women’s costumes. which really sums up the different / gendered expectations with regard to figure skaters’ appearances and how that ties into the pervasive homophobia in competitive figure skating. (this article discusses both pretty comprehensively.)

so, building off of all that, and off of character wardrobes in canon, some fairly General statements about costumes in this au:

in singles, evan’s costumes are what could be called “conservative” (if you’re being kind) or “boring” (if you’re being honest.) very standard shirt & pants-type combos, muted / dark colors. a decent amount of blue, but nothing bordering on bright / electric blue. he very much wants the focus to be on his skating alone, rather than how he looks while he’s doing it or what this or that costume Means. there’s been an air of spectacle around his career for years, and he doesn’t want to encourage it.

in singles, jared’s costumes are flashier than evan’s - more color, slightly more imaginative cuts, more likely to be Relevant to the themes / narratives of his programs - but still trying to be Masculine. not much in the way of frills or rhinestones on his costumes. he doesn’t want to be Yet Another Male Skater Wearing All Black, because that’s boring as hell, and he does enjoy just a bit of spectacle, because why be a figure skater if you don’t want to put on a show? but he’s well aware of how male skaters whose costumes are ““too”” creative / flashy, and who themselves are  ““too”” theatrical, are talked about, and he doesn’t want that to happen to him.

in pairs, jared and evan have to find an approach to costuming that works for both of them. they are also both aware that as a man/man pairs team, they could wear the most aggressively boringly heterosexual costumes imaginable (like, wrinkled collared shirt and khakis straight off the hanger) and still get a thousand tweets / comments / thinkpieces to the effect of “Does Hansen And Kleinman Are Gay??” after every performance, and that the whole point of this endeavor is to try and break down / show the pointlessness of the extremely Gendered nature of competitive figure skating. their singles costumes were quite different from one another, but all still designed with “what do i have to avoid to be Safe” in mind just as much as “what do i want to wear / what would suit me and my skating”; their pairs costumes are suitably Complementary to one another and lean just a little more in the direction of flashiness / fun and away from Sufficient And Necessary Masculinity. 

(drop me two characters and a hand emoji for headcanons)