I first saw her on a TV show, I think it was “So you think you got talent” or something like that. Now she is on a commercial, but I don’t know what it advertises.
Her magic trick is to rapidly change dresses. In one instance, she holds a hoop draped in cloth, raises it above her head and when she drops it, she has a different dress on. I can figure out part of this one, it appears that she is holding the hoop with both hands, but since her assistant holds the hoop up first, she could hold it with one hand and use a dummy hand, hung on the hoop, to make it appear that she couldn’t use her hands for this trick.
Her most impressive quick change occurs when her assistant dumps a bag of glitter over her head and as the glitter falls, her dress changes again.
This description probably doesn’t make much sense to those who haven’t seen the trick, so maybe someone can do a better description than I have.
So, my question is how does she do it?
My theory - spoilered if it is bad form to tell magic secrets (if I’m on to something)
I have a theory that she has a special dress that has several bottoms to it. These bottoms are colored differently on each side and are layered on top of each other. The inside of one bottom is the same color and pattern of the outside of the bottom underneath it. If the top layered bottom could be pulled up around her shoulders and formed into a top, it would look like one outfit. She could then quickly pull that top down which would uncover the top underneath it and cover up the bottom below it which would make it look like she completely changed.
My problem with this theory is that her top should get smaller as the show proceeds and her bottom should get larger. This doesn’t seem to happen. If anything, it looks like she puts on a whole new dress over her previous one.
For anyone interested in seeing this, I saw it on YouTube awhile back. Dunno what it’s called, though.
Yes, it was an amazing act. I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it, either. One or two changes, sure, I can imagine the predictable trick dresses would suffice. But this involved at least a half-dozen changes, and some of the outfits were skimpy enough to make the trick all the more impressive. And ditto on the glitter finale – she only had a couple of seconds to pull that one off.
A couple of those look fairly straightforward–the first one is just a pullover hanging from the hoop. When she picks it up, she grabs the hoop in such a way that when she drops the hoop, the dress is pulled off the inside of the dangly parts of the hoop and falls into place around her. Notice that you don’t see the hoop again…
I don’t have any real information for you, but if you want to Google more information and evaluate it for yourself, the type of act in question is often referred to as “quick change artists” and the woman in the Youtube video is named Dania, her partner is David.
I remember most of this from a thread discussing them a couple of months ago, which I’m too lazy to do a search for-- and which I don’t think provided any specifics anyway.
Yeah, my googling yielded nothing about the mechanics of the trick. I’m guessing they want to keep it a secret. I guess I was just looking for theories.
In earlier discussions, it was insinuated that the fabric used for the costumes is very light and thin, with possibly some weighting to help them fall into place quickly.
I have seen a quickchange of this sort used in a ballroom dance routine. The full change went from both the man and woman in sort of black overalls to him in a tuxedo and her in a full ball gown. The overalls were not particularly bulky or loose fitting at the start, and the change took less than two seconds.
My guess would be very specialized costumes with thin fabric tightly packed, and probably only one actual full change of costume. I’ve seen the Youtube video, though, and it’s really impressive, even if that is how it’s accomplished.
It looks to me like each successive dress is going over the top of the previous ones–notice that the skirts get longer and fuller. When she’s in the pink one, there are quite obviously lots of layers of fabric under it.
Before I watched the video, I assumed that it was layers of dresses coming off–like the geisha in Teahouse under the August Moon. I’m impressed that this one goes the other way.
They were on “America’s Got Talent” on TV several months ago.
Slick trick to change so fast. which of course dazzles the viewer into thinking it is almost magic.
Watching the clips on their website (better resolution than the YouTube clips), I’m guessing that the act combines some costumes that are ‘strip-away’, where a layer is shed, and other layers that invert to reveal a new color. The patent suggests that at least some layers are shed, and the dropped layer is concealed by some sort of business on the floor. In the YouTube clip, I think that her first outfit is dropped when the ring is dropped. Similarly, I think that his black tux breaks away and is left in the cloth tube on the floor. For the final change, I think that her pink top is stripped down and becomes the blue star part of the final dress; it sort of drapes over one hip. In some of the clips, when she spins at the end, you can see that she has a couple of layers of ‘petticoats’ of different colors under the final skirt.
In contrast to Sattua, I think that most if not all of the layers are already on her at the start; they’re just very thin and she’s pretty slim, so it’s not too obvious, especially with the dangly fluttery bits at the start. It seems like it would be much, much faster to yank something down or off than to pull it on.
I’ve seen David and Dania live at Abbott’s Magic Get-Together 2005 and their performance is absolutely amazing. I have an idea on a couple of the changes, but some of them are just too impossible to explain.
Look at the first change, as the clock ticks 11 seconds, you can see the shoulder straps of the blue dress being whipped out of sight exposing the purple dress underneath before she covers up, as she is holding the ring with both hands.
There is likely some mechanism with springs and threads that does the deed.
As others have stated, the final dresses really look full and not very flattering, so Occam’s Razor says that that’s where the prior dresses are going. I think that the key is that the fullness is an unflattering fullness: the only reason it would appear like that for the trick.
