Sexy Chiquita Banana Girl (Carmen Miranda)

I’ve wanted to create a Chiquita Banana Girl costume for a few years now, so I was so happy to see my ideas come to life. I was inspired by a Carmen Miranda costume that I saw online. It was a yellow bra top with heaps of fake fruit attached, I thought the idea was cute, but I wanted to put my own spin on it.

I began with searching for a simple yellow bra, but I didn’t have much luck so I ended up purchasing a yellow bathing suit top online for about $20. Then I took a trip to Michael’s Craft Store and splurged on fake fruit ($55). I bought grapes, red apples, green apples, oranges, lemons, limes, etc. Michael’s didn’t carry fake bananas so I ordered an 8-pack of Styrofoam bananas off of Amazon for about $10. For the skirt, I went to Jo-Ann Fabrics and purchased two yards of the royal blue spandex material and two yards of the banana yellow spandex material ($30). In addition, I picked up a Styrofoam head mount so that I could easily create the fruit turban ($4).

I used a hot glue gun and glued the fruit to the yellow bating suit top. I found it was much easier to glue the fruit to the top while wearing it so that the placement of the fruit was exactly where I wanted it.

Then I began to make the turban, I cut two 3-inch strips of the royal blue spandex material and sewed them together to create a turban. I placed the turban on the Styrofoam head and began to glue the fruit on. I had to try it on a few times to make sure the fruit was sitting on my head right, It was a trial and error process.

I was nervous to make the skirt, I knew I wanted a super flowy, ruffle filled Spanish style skirt with a high slit, but I wasn’t quite sure how to tackle it. I wrapped the yellow spandex material around my waist and pined it a few times, allowing a rather high slit. Then I wrapped the blue spandex material on top and sewed them together. Then I added ruffles to the skirt but cutting long 3-inch strips, I pinned the yellow strips to the edges of the blue skirt and the blue strips to the edges of the yellow skirt. As I pinned the material, I made sure it was ruffled up, and then I sewed it on. This was time consuming because it is a hard material to sew.

For the accessories, I hot glued a bunch of bananas together (6) and attached it to a rubber band to wear around my wrist all night. I used Chiquita banana stickers from real bananas and placed them on the center of each Styrofoam banana. In addition, I wore nude heels and placed two Chiquita banana stickers on them to complete the look. For the final touches, I wore gold hoops and bright red lipstick.

Overall I received an overwhelming amount of compliments, everyone seemed to love it, and they recognized that I was the Chiquita Banana girl aka Carmen Miranda. I was very pleased with the whole look. I loved that it was original, creative, and sexy at the same time!

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