User blog:Belle pullman/Costume Design groups and generations

I'm musing on the different costume design groups... Basically, within the umbrella of the licenced replica productions, there's... what, 4 main groups of costume design-
 * London - video, UK tour, Russia, recent German
 * Broadway - US tours, early German etc
 * World Tour - Australian, Asia tours
 * Japan.

You can argue that Hamburg costumes developed distinctly separate from the US tours, but they start back at the same root - Parsons Meares on Broadway. London style costumes were in their own little bubble until the success of the video spreading that interpretation of the character designs. Japan is still its own bubble, descended from the 1981 London designs in a unique direction, distinctly Japanese in influence. The World tour costumes have a bit of Broadway in the character names, a bit of Japan in the brush strokes, a bit of the crazy in the wig length... I'd like to know more, I presume their costumes are made in Australia for the various Asia-Pacific tours. As I mentioned earlier, Parsons-Meares made the Broadway and US Tour costumes until US V where Troika made the costumes in-house. I'm sure Hamburg made their costumes in-house, but did they still for Stuttgart and Berlin? Who made the Russian Cats costumes?

Update:  WELL!

More answers have kinda been forthcoming since I wrote this Blog. I'd initially discounted the Vienna etc line - to be fair photos of them are rare! And I'm not so sure that Parsons Meares WERE responsible for the initial Hamburg costumes. Well, it's still the most logical hypothesis, but there's not documentation, where there IS documentation of Parsons-Meares making the first run of German Starlight Express costumes.