When The Masked Singer UK airs each week, the singers and their performances send viewers into a frenzy as they strive to analyse the clues and identify the identities.
Many people don’t realise how much labour goes into producing the fantastic costumes, with some taking several weeks to prepare before being revealed in front of presenter Joel Dommett and judges Mo Gilligan, Davina McCall, Rita Ora, and Jonathan Ross.
In an interview with Metro.co.uk, costume designer Tim Simpson of Plunge Creations claimed that Jellyfish took the longest to make of all the characters on the ITV series this year, including Rhino, Rubbish, and Phoenix.
He highlighted how the costume team had to be careful to keep the garment’s ‘balance,’ considering that they also had lights to contend with in the midst of the cloth.
‘I’d say Jellyfish was the most time-consuming. There’s a lot of hand sewing, and there’s a lot of texture. ‘There’s the lighting involved,’ Tim explained.
‘One time we’d have the lighting functioning and then suddenly we’d have a failure on the lighting and then we’d look at it and actually go no, it needs a bit extra lighting here and there.

‘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 detailed that those watching at home can only imagine what it must be like to wear and act in them.
Knitting, it turns out, was the heaviest of the bunch, weighing in at 20kg and using just under 350 metres of wool.
‘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.