Tonight is opening night at San Francisco Opera. Dan and I will be there to see and hear Aida. This is our second opening night year in a row … cool, eh? Especially since this year opening night came with the Tuesday night series we are attending. I’m hoping to do a bit of tweeting or blogging (or both), sharing pictures of all the fancy gowns … we’ll see if I can make that happen. (The iPhone does make this more of a possibility.) Stay tuned!

To work up to the evening, here’s a little snippet from Opera Tatler, from her blog entry of her interview with costume designer Zandra Rhodes:

OT: How does designing for the opera compare to designing clothes?
ZR: They use lovely big safety pins. Designing for the opera, you have to, well, you do have to have the imagination to make a size 16 feel as if she’s a 10. I think the stars are quite amazing. They come at in all this sort of stuff and convey the point about the music and everything, I just think it is incredible, I love all the little tricks you have to use and the things you have to do to make the clothes do things that you can’t do when you are working on a practical level. I mean, to me it’s been very exciting, being able to use things that as a textile designer, all the things I’ve done are all, I can use my textiles to “Zandra-ify” all the clothes. For example, hang on, I’ll bring a couple around that we are not using. These aren’t being worn, these are the ones in London that were for the princess. But the point is, that actually started off as plain cloth. I can take a piece of orange cloth, and print it or paint it or pleat it, because that’s what I do, and turn it into a garment that does different things. These are all based on different things that I’ve done. I did an Egyptian collection in 1986, and I designed a leopard skin, so all the priests have got turquoise printed leopard skin. You also get, in opera, what is clever adaptation. For example, I might have an original design, but the likelihood is you don’t always get someone with that physique, so he might end up more covered up. So you get slight different interpretations. Funnily enough, when we started with The Pearl Fishers, in San Diego, we had them in t-shirts, fully dressed with the leopard skin. It has done 10 towns across America, and since then, all of the guys have done it bare chested, and looked fabulous.

Do read the entire blog entry … it’s fun!