The Masked Singer UK costume designer reveals Jellyfish took longest to make as team spent weeks bringing intricate design to life

When The Masked Singer UK is on each week, the singers and their performances leave fans in a frenzy as viewers try desperately to decipher the clues to guess the identities.

However, many may not realise the amount of work that goes into creating the incredible costumes, with some taking several weeks to prepare before they’re unveiled in front of host Joel Dommett and judges Mo Gilligan, Davina McCall, Rita Ora and Jonathan Ross.

While speaking to Metro.co.uk, costume designer Tim Simpson of Plunge Creations revealed that among the characters on the ITV series this year – which include the likes of Rhino, Rubbish and Phoenix – Jellyfish took the longest to create.

He explained how the team who make the outfits had to be careful to preserve the ‘balance’ of the costume, given they also had lighting to contend with in the midst of the fabric.

‘I would say the one that took the longest was Jellyfish. It’s a lot of hand sewing, it’s lots of textures. There’s the lighting that goes into it,’ Tim explained.

‘One moment we’d have the lighting working and then suddenly we’d have a failure on the lighting and then we’d look at it and actually go no, it needed a bit more lighting here and there.

Of course a costume as ornate as this wasn’t made overnight (Picture: ITV)

‘The moment you bring lighting into the mix, it can throw the balance of a costume to a degree, and so you have to be quite careful and sparing with the use of light in costumes. Unless you want something to be absolutely bananas, which of course is probably going to happen at some point.’

The costume designer continued: ‘Jellyfish probably took the best part of five weeks, five or six weeks, front to back, and [we had] quite a team working on it.’

That team consisted of around five to six people, which he outlined is ‘common’ when it comes to the design and manufacturing process with costumes.

‘You’ve actually got at least five or six people working on any one costume as it goes through different stages of the workshop,’ he stated.

‘So it might be the clay sculpt at the beginning where you’ve got to get the character right, it might be the making of the mask, it might be the eyes, the main bits of the costume. The feet and the hands are a whole other issue because we’ve got to completely hide these people. There’s quite a team that work on all of them.’

Some of the costumes are so elaborate, that people at home can only imagine what they must be like to wear and perform in.

Knitting, it turns out, was the heaviest of the lot, weighing 20kg and using just under 350 metres of wool.

Whoever is underneath the costume, hats off to them (Picture: ITV)

‘The whole costume is hand-knitted by a woman who knits with her arms instead of knitting needles because it’s so big. It just is a really heavy costume, because there’s that much wool in it,’ Tim shared.

‘I love the fact that it doesn’t have any eyes. It makes all the other costumes look sort of fiddly, because it is so big and cartoon and simple. I love Knitting, I think that’s a cracking costume, that one.’

The Masked Singer UK returns next Saturday at 7pm on ITV.

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Can you guess how long it took to make?