there is a trend in the hip hop community right now that teams/crews will wear costumes that are color-coordinated, but are not matching. each dancer will have an outfit of his or her own flavor, and all the the colors will still match but the outfits are not all the same...

sometimes certain pieces of the outfits will be matching... like a few people will have the same tshirt, or something... sometimes this does not happen.

i have tried to do this with some of my older students but with about a 50% success rate. my most successful was when i gave each dancer a swatch of our two "theme colors" and set some rules about layers etc.... & it turned out pretty alright. but sometimes what we get is like 15 people wearing the same colored bottoms, and the remaining 3 wearing something different, or ex: if the colors were red and black, 12/15 dancers come with black pants and a red shirt, and only a few think outside of the box...and then its just a fail. <<< this is what i'm trying to avoid.

HOWEVER, i have also seen this done with kids successfully and figure there must be some secret to making this work that i am missing...

do the teachers pick out the outfits for everyone? or do you send swatches home? or what do you do to make this work..? i have a group of very low income students and would like to give them the opportunity to "make their own outfits" this year, so that they can be on the lookout picking up pieces all year long - keeping the cost minimal for them, and also maintaining that our outfits look good.

any ideas or thoughts on how to make this fool-proof?
i'm sincerely open to and appreciative of any suggestions you may have!!

here are links to some links to better photos of what i'm talking about...

www.abakustakeout.com . . .

www.mtv.com . . .

I do this with my advanced jazz class all the time. Most of the girls in the class are in anywhere from 5 to 12 recital routines, so any way that I can save them some money, I try to.

I usually just tell them what colors I'd like to use, and they're pretty good about finding things on their own. But I also have them bring me their stuff several weeks before the show so I can see all the costumes together, and if I need to tweak anything, I will. I've even had some girls text me pictures of things they were thinking of buying so I could give a "yay" or "nay" to it before they purchased it. If they DO buy something new, I tell them to hang on to the receipt in case it doesn't work.

My studio does this a lot in other classes as well. Some of us (teachers) have even been known to buy a few pieces in different sizes and let the students who want to use them just pay us back for them.

I have done this but assigned color tops, bottoms and accessories to each student.
For example I assign 5 students red bottoms, yellow shirts and purple accessories , I might assign the next 5 purple bottoms, yellow shirts and red accessories while my last group of 5 wears yellow bottoms, purple tops and red or purple accessories.