When The Masked Singer first premiered on Fox in early January, social media lit up almost immediately for one obvious reason: its mesmerizingly unhinged costumes. A karaoke contest featuring a dancing peacock, a steampunk deer, a furry monster, and a lion that looks like it just got off a private jet from a fashion show held in a Las Vegas casino? Yes, please! The singing competition—in which each performer’s identity is kept a secret until they are eliminated—is based on a Korean format, but its grandiose costumes take the idea to the next level. So it’s no secret that they took longer than your average Halloween costume to construct.

In total, Masked Singer costume designer Marina Toybina worked for months on these insane getups. It took her three weeks to come up with about 20 characters and sketch them out; then, once the options had been whittled down to 12 final characters, it took two months to design and sew them from scratch.

What’s striking about the costumes is how much aesthetic ground they cover; each appears to have sprouted from its own world. That, Toybina said, is by design. Each idea had its own inspiration: a pink, sunglass-wearing poodle was inspired by the little dogs that populate Beverly Hills, for instance. But she also wanted the design to stand out—so she made its look geometric, “so it had this playful, high-end fashion feel to it, but also was a little bit on the diva side.” The ominous-looking deer, Toybina said, was inspired by woodland creatures and the ethereal, but also folds in steampunk elements: “It creates this story and this mood of like, a ‘war soldier trapped in a wood’ kind of feel.” The unicorn and the lion, by contrast, were inspired by the fashion world—designers like Thierry Mugler, Hussein Chalayan, and Alexander McQueen. Characters like the raven and the rabbit are creatures inspired by Hollywood—The Crow and Donnie Darko, respectively.

As fantastical as its costumes may be, The Masked Singer is also driven by the mystery at its center: no one knows who each performer is, although the Internet is rife with guesses and solid theories. (Admittedly, another appealing element is how amusingly off-base the judges’ guesses tend to be; no, Hugh Jackman is likely not on a Fox reality program, and Meghan Markle definitely isn’t stopping by.) But even Toybina admits she isn’t sure how many people at Fox are aware of the singers’ true identities. Toybina did the fittings for the show either at her studio or at the costume shop to ensure secrecy. Some of the performers indicated which character they wanted to play, while Toybina cast those who did not have a preference herself.

The most work, Toybina said, went into the masks—specifically, making sure performers could see, breathe, and sing in them without any difficulty. “A lot of the times we got lucky and we were able to nail the masks right away, but there were a few tweaks that were going on as the songs were changing, or based on the performances,” she said. “But it's just little things that I was able to do while they were wearing and performing in the masks.”

Which of the costumes was her favorite to design? The lion is certainly up there, “because it was so rich, as far as doing a sketch and figuring out how to make this character be royal, in a sense—god-like.” The lion’s mask is also unique: not molded from foam, like the show’s other head coverings, but sculpted and coated in pure gold, according to Toybina. “And then we added the gemstones to it, to replicate my sketch. And then the costume part of it came together from assortment of different materials to kind of create this richness and detailing.”

Instead of doing metal work for the rest of the costume, Toybina treated leathers to age them and give them a metallic look. The resulting costume has an armor-like aesthetic, but allows for movement in a way that metal would not. “I wanted it to have volume on stage, to where it was not a difficult piece to wear,” Toybina said. Most of the characters, she noted, came out looking almost identical to her initial sketches.

The Masked Singer represents a unique opportunity for any designer: creating looks for a TV series in which the costume work is actually front and center. To Toybina, it’s a dream come true—although she admits she didn’t quite expect her looks to take off as a national topic of conversation. “It’s great to see that we’re having wardrobe speak its story, and the costumes kind of make these characters come to life,” Toybina said. “I think that’s what’s so entertaining—you’re almost forgetting who’s really behind the mask ’til the very end, and you’re just being entertained.” It’s rare, she added, for reality TV to invest in such extravagant costuming; the show, she said, is almost like a miniature version of specials like MTV’s Video Music Awards, which also features custom looks for each performance.

“The more I talk about it, it’s just so surreal to me,” Toybina said. “I hope that this opens up more doors for costume design to be in a forum like this, and not just theatrics or movies, or big tours—that there’s room now, and there’s this little niche for something so great to be on television.”

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