Celebrating a scintillating worm with bite!

WOW Designer, Sean Purucker, is a Specialty Costume Manufacturer from Los Angeles, United States, where he has worked on many Disney mascot characters, Katy Perry tours, the USA Masked Singer, and part of Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl Half Time Show!

Sean and co-designer Tony Revera created GiGi the Wyrm of Spinelesque, a bizarre burlesque dancer who is very good at her job - you can look but don't touch! At the 2024 WOW Show ‘Gigi’ was awarded Crazy Curiosities of the Creature Carnival Section Winner, Absolutely Positively Wellington International Design – Americas, and International Overall Winner.

As part of our 2024 designer series, we sat down with Sean after the 2024 WOW Show Awards Ceremony to hear more about his creative process.

‍Interviewer: How are you feeling today?

Sean: I’m feeling really good. I did not expect this. So, I'm feeling really good. Surprised, it took me till later in the night to really comprehend all the goodness and at the same time the kind of like, ah, because I made my entry with a friend, and he couldn't be here. And I'm someone that, I get more enjoyment seeing someone else and their reaction to the enjoyment and I didn’t get that. I would’ve loved to see my friend Tony Rivas here, enjoying things for the first time, ‘cause he’s never been here. I’ve been here plenty of times. This is my eleventh time here for a while, and hopefully Tony can come back next year.

Interviewer: Was he thrilled?

Sean: I texted him. I knew, time zone wise, he’d be asleep. So, when he woke up, there’s a lot of emojis that he sent like, oh, yeah!

GiGi the Wyrm of Spinelesque, Sean Purucker & Tony Rivas, United States

Interviewer: What was it like seeing your beautiful Gigi on stage?

Sean: I only looked at her to get as much eyeball time on her as possible because I know this is going to be the last time I’m going to see it on stage. So, I just looked at her wherever she was and totally excited to see how to model behaved and whether any awards were won or not, my favourite thing was that they always take the finale explosion photo right in the centre and she was the front, front of everything, so that is something that I would probably frame, people when they come over they’d want to know what’s the story behind this big photo with the worm with an open mouth bra and so, yeah, that’s how I felt about them.

Interviewer: What motivates you to enter a competition like WOW?

Sean: Okay, see, some people get motivated by fame. I don’t care. Some people get motivated by money; money’s good but you can make money anytime, anywhere, doing anything. What motivates me for this is personal reasons. The first time I ever did WOW, it, you know, I won some prize money to buy a car. I didn’t have a car at the time, and it just changed life for me, it just got better and then I’ve has just many reasons why I've kept doing this also it was the reason I joined social media. I wasn’t really active on social media back in 2008, the first time I did it and I knew that Facebook and then Instagram were going to be the only ways to keep in touch with all these people, not even just for a while purposes but you get birthday reminders and see who had a baby and all those things, you know.

Sean Purucker & GiGi the Wyrm of Spinelesque, Sean Purucker & Tony Rivas, United States

Interviewer: What were the interesting materials you used?

Sean: It’s sculptured foam and then my friend Tony does amazing paint jobs and he’s someone that sometimes downplays and I’m like no Tony you are really good you know, you are really good at paintjobs. And then there’s this kind of clear rubber gel called UreCoat, it’s like a urethane liquid rubber like molasses you can apply multiple coats and it’s kind of self-leveling, so it’s all goopy but then it kind of evens out and it really is squishy and flexible and you can add colour to it but we just kept it clear to make it look kind of slimy, so all the tentacles an the head and the feet were very slimy, that we had to just strategically put on parts of the body drips. We couldn’t coat the whole body in the UreCoat because the bodysuit would never stretch - if it’s all rubber, no. So, we tried to make them both look like they were rubber – coated as much as possible. I never really worked with that material before. I learned about that material working and living in LA. I’m a, my job classification is specialty costume, manufacture, and builder, and I was working on the Katy Perry Las Vegas presidency show, and she has a part of the show where there’s a frog woman, and parts of the frog had this shiny, glossy, rubber goop, and I was like what is this and I was told, and I found out about it, and I started to play with it.

Interviewer: What is part of your design process when you are creating a work of wearable art?

Sean: So, two things. I like to take things that happen in real-life, real-life events, and how that can lead in and work its way into an idea. And the, I take a material and say, “What can I do with this?” And the two inspirational stories for Gigi, the worm of Spinelesque. In Los Angeles, I know people who are part of the dancer community and there’s a birthday party that happens every year. It’s a burlesque show and they all have their birthday on one party day and the party is themed. So, one year, the burlesque birthday party was called Bird-lesque. So, it was bird themed: feathers, beaks, roosters and then last year, it was called Spinelesque. So, it’s a play on things that are spinless. So, invertebrates, octopus, clams, bees, roaches. I made some worm thing. And then I only spent four days working on it. So, you could tell it was very quick. But airbrush does magic. And then I thought, I want to do a WOW version of this. And that’s what turned, and I wanted to do kind of like a showgirl version because if, if you think of showgirls, they have like the tailfeathers, the big fan, but I’d never seen anyone do like, like, with worms, like that would be really cool. It’s never been done before.

And the other inspiration is, years ago, I used to live with two people who did exotic dancing and they would get hired at different clubs and different venues and this one woman, Sandra, she, sometimes men and people would reach up and try to grab her and when she’s like I’ve had enough of this, I’m fed up, she would go change her shoes and she’d put on shoes that have these pokey spikes. So, if anyone tried to reach up, they’d get poked, they get, you know, boobie trapped and so that’s why the bra when it opens up, there’s a mouth.

Interviewer: And what’s next for you Sean?

Sean: So, I actually am going to be doing WOW again because, it’s funny in the way that things work out ‘cause Gigi, and actually Gigi is named after one of our favourite people at my job, it’s actually named after a real person, who I had first asked her to be the model. She couldn’t do it, but we still kept the name, it’s named after her, and Gigi was the backup plan. I had started another idea, and things, there were holdups and things didn’t work out, so until I tried to get that sorted out, I asked Tony, until this gets figured out, do you want to do this one [Gigi]? I tried to do both the entries at the same time, just, there was, usually they’re going to be one or none and I can’t abandon Tony’s. That would not be fair, so that means I’m going to come back next year with the one that is halfway done!