My completed Fortunato costume in action!
Published July 15th, 2026
Here are a bunch of pics of my Fortunato (zombificato!) costume in action! Most of these were taken on Mardi Gras day in the French Quarter here in New Orleans, and the nice posed ones in front of the dark wall were a few days earlier in City Park.
In these pics you can get a sense of what it was like for me to wear/carry this big 'ol brick wall prop all over the place; it really wasn't too bad! I'm very happy with how the overall effect came out.
I wrote about my process for making this costume over five parts: the mask (part 1 and part 2), the brick wall, the hands, and the bottle/suit/etc.
My next Mardi Gras costume is already planned out, and... I think it might be a little more complicated than this one? We'll see! Can't wait!
My very long and convoluted thought process for designing this Fortunato costume
This here is way, way, way too much information, more about my philosophy for designing this costume rather than the practicalities for actually making the thing, but if you're interested, here goes...
I honestly don't remember how I initially got the idea to be Fortunato for Mardi Gras, but I know the idea hit me a long time ago and I'd been daydreaming about it for many months. I hadn't read The Cask of Amontillado since English class in middle school, but I remembered that the story is set during Carnival and that Fortunato and Montresor are dressed in Carnival garb, so right away I was excited about doing a costume that's relevant to the historical origins of Mardi Gras. The zombie idea didn't hit me at first; that came later...
My first vision for the costume was Fortunato as he's trapped behind the wall, with just his head visible through one small hole, like Montresor hasn't finished walling him up yet. But then I had a thought... The Mardi Gras krewe I'm part of, Cryptique, has an over-arching theme of monsters and anything spooky ("cryptids, creeps, and cadavers!"), so I then decided at the very least I should be a dead, skeletal Fortunato behind the brick wall. Problem number one: If he's dead, that would mean the wall was complete, so why would there be a hole where we can see his face? Problem number two: I've done about a dozen skeleton costumes already; I'm pretty bored of skeletons! Problem number three: Part of my philosophy for my Cryptique costumes is that I want them to be colorful and festive, so I really didn't want to do a black and white skeleton and a gray wall. I wanted to figure out a way to make this gloomy concept for a costume into something really vibrant and colorful.
That's how I got the idea to be an undead, sort of cartoonish version of Fortunato, where he's basically a zombie who's busted out of his prison and he's walking around with the broken wall stuck to him. This works out great for a few reasons: It lets me also have the zombie hands sticking out in front, which lets me show off the bottle of amontillado, and it also makes it a little less weird that my legs and feet are visible below the wall. And it's also just a fun idea; a dumb drunk zombie walking around in a broken brick wall. And I could do a bright green (or whatever color) zombie face instead of a boring white skull.
Sometime during my daydreaming about the costume I got the idea for the name Fortunato Zombificato, which immediately was incredibly pleasing to me. I did a little research and I believe I've managed to correctly Italian-ify the word "zombified" into zombifacato, and in Italian (like other Romance languages) it's standard that the adjective would go after the name like this.
Now, for the actual costume design. Whenever I'm doing a design that's based on an existing thing, I like to do a lot of sketching before doing any research or looking at any reference imagery at all. I want to go in blind and wing it, so the design really comes from my own imagination, and then maybe I'll tweak some details after looking at some proper references. Like I mentioned, I hadn't read The Cask of Amontillado since middle school (>35 years ago!), but I remembered the basic details of the story. I very specifically remembered that Fortunato is dressed in "motley," because in my English class we'd talked about how that meant colorful Carnival clothes. I could not remember any other details about Fortunato's appearance, so that gave me a mostly blank canvas for sketching.
I thought about the design for the costume as four main parts: the face/mask, the hat, the clothing, and the wall.
I originally thought I'd want to go with one of those classic Carnival masks with the pointy and weirdly stretched-out upper lip. But as I sketched, I realized that style of mask covers too much of the face to allow for the human/zombie face itself to be very expressive. So I abandoned that idea and decided I'd go with a smaller eye mask instead.
I also decided I would make Fortunato's face and hands bright green, rather than a more realistic gross zombie color/texture. I did not want this costume to be truly scary or disgusting; just funny and spooky. And for Mardi Gras I always want to go with the brightest, most saturated colors possible; nothing gloomy!
For the hat, I initially was set on doing an ornate tricorn hat, which is fairly typical style for Venetian Carnival costumes. I did some sketching and even watched a video about how real tricorn hats are made, with the intention of doing a paper macheé version. Later on when I finally let myself read the story I learned that Fortunato's "head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells," so that threw a wrench in the works. Of course I could've just ignored that detail, but I decided to try to design something that merges a basic tricorn hat shape with a cone and bells on top. I spent a ton of time making the thing, and in the end it just didn't look right, so I scrapped it and started over with a more normal Pagliacci-style conical hat. The bells, it turns out, are kind of an important detail, because Montresor mentions hearing them a couple times as Fortunato is dying. So I made a plan to definitely include real jingle bells; I went and bought oversized ones because they seem a little sillier.
As for clothing, my very first thought was to go with a loose-fitting and colorful sort of satin-y clown outfit, since we know Fortunato is dressed in motley — I was picturing a Pagliacci-style, classic commedia dell'arte kind of thing. However, that would be a big departure from my own personal tradition of wearing a typical men's suit for all (well, almost all) of my costumes. I like to base most of my Halloween and Mardi Gras costumes on a men's suit, because I like to dress fairly fancy in real life, and I feel like having costumes that are fancy makes them really match my style and personality; people have commented on this and this pleases me immensely. So I started thinking about how I could do something that combines a men's suit with this idea of "motley." One of the first things that occurred to me was to make a suit that's split down the middle with two different colors, since a lot of those sort of classic clown-ish Carnival costumes do that. I messed around a lot with colors and looked at what my options were for cheap colorful suits on Amazon, and I decided on this weird light orange and magenta — which, along with Fortunato's green face, would be a (very) rough approximation of the traditional Mardi Gras colors. (That's another concept I like to play around with; my gargoyle costume last year was light purple with some accents of bright orange and bright green; I don't think anyone noticed but I don't care! I do this stuff for me. Same for my Creature from the Black Bayou costume: green mask and suit, purple shirt, gold crown/lips/tie/belt/shoes.)
I got the idea for adding glittery symbols and shapes on the suit as a way to make it more festive. Then I read in the story it says Fortunato "had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress [...]." I'm not even sure what "dress" means in this context, but I'm not worried about it. I'm also not familiar with the term "parti-striped" but I'm guessing that just means colorful stripes or something along those lines. Hmm, painting stripes on the suit would be a lot more complicated than adding little stars and moons and suns. I decided to go for a very subtle cop-out and just paint stripes onto my vest, which very few people would probably notice, but I enjoy adding one more little nod to the story, as interpreted by me.
Another detail that surprised me when I finally allowed myself to read the story me was Montresor describing throwing a chain around Fortunato's waist and attaching it to two metal staples that were embedded in the floor of the catacombs. So that inspired me to want to add a chain around my waist for the costume. I actually starting making a chain by hand using posterboard and foam clay, but it ended up being a tremendous amount of work and it ultimately looked just like a plastic chain you'd buy at a hardware store, so I opted for that instead; I bought a kind of oversized silver/gray plastic chain and used that.
I had the idea about adding the text, "For the love of god, Montresor!" somewhere; I thought about maybe a word balloon above or below my head, or graffiti on the wall, and I eventually settled on putting it on the back of my jacket in sparkly letters. And I was pleased to think of adding this detail because it would be a good addition for my "secondary costume"...
For several years now my wife and I have designed our Mardi Gras costumes with a sort of secondary costume in mind. Our Mardi Gras day starts with our march with Cryptique, and after that the krewe disbands and my wife and I wander around the French Quarter and the Marigny and Bywater and join various street parties. We love having big elaborate costumes for the Cryptique parade, but we prefer to have simpler, easier-to-wear costumes for the rest of the day — trying to dance/drink/celebrate in a giant mask ain't easy, and carrying a giant mask around all day is no fun. We want to be able to abandon the big pieces at our car after our parade and swap them out for something simple that still goes with our costumes' concepts — often this is a smaller mask and/or a hat and/or an ornate headpiece, etc. Sometimes it involves a change of clothes or shoes.
So my secondary costume this year involved me ditching the wall and the big Fortunato mask and replacing them with a smaller eye mask and a normal human-sized tricorn hat (which I made myself) with bells on it. I also made a fake mustache to be connected to my septum ring.
But going back to the text on the my back... without the wall, I don't think anyone could possibly guess that I'm Fortunato (which is totally okay!) but the text definitely made some people get it, which was fun. A few people saw the text from far away and yelled it at me from afar! Who knows if they really knew what it was from or not?
About the bottle of amontillado: here's an interesting(??) dilemma! I thought of adding the bottle pretty early in my design process, like as soon as I envisioned the zombie hands busting through the wall. But after spending a long time on the design and re-reading the story, it dawned on me: There's probably no actual amontillado in the story! It's really just a ruse! That's pretty clear by the time you're nearing the end. Before re-reading the story, I thought maybe there really is a cask there in the catacombs and maybe Fortunato is distracted in his delight at finding it and that's the moment when Montresor strikes — but nope; Poe never mentions that. They do drink a lot of wine on their way down there, but there is no amontillado. So, what to do? Should I abandon the idea and remove this clue about my costume? I decided to just keep it. Now, I do not know why my brain insists on inventing scenarios that justify this, but here are a couple: It actually is possible that there was a cask of amontillado at the end of the tunnel where Montrsor imprisons Fortunato, even if it's not mentioned; maybe the guys just don't acknowledge it because they're both too distracted by the murdering and the getting murdered. Or, how about this? Fortunato becomes a zombie and busts out of the catacombs, and after all that talk of amontillado he decides to go find some. Sure! Or, like, hey, this is Mardi Gras morning; maybe some other reveler recognized him and just handed him the bottle! Okay, all of that is ridiculous, but I think the design element adds a lot to the costume visually and it's also a fun clue for people. I really really doubt anyone who sees my costume and recognizes that I'm Fortunato will think, "Hpmh, he really didn't stay faithful to the source material; this costume sucks."
I had an idea about adding some little references to other Poe stories in the costume design, and ultimately I did just two. One is that the label on the amontillado bottle says "Chateau Corbeau"; corbeau is the French word for raven/crow. (Weirdly they don't differentiate.) And when I was making the rings to go on my fake zombie hands, I was looking for trinkets in my house that could serve as jewels/charms on the rings, and I realized I had a little metal scarab beetle, which I could paint gold as a reference to The Gold Bug! That was one of my favorite Poe stories as a little kid. The scarab came from a fellow krewe member from the previous Mardi Gras; she was a mummy that year, and the little scarabs were her "throw"; that's the local word for the trinkets that some people throw or hand out during Carnival. So it was exciting to be able to add a piece of a previous Mardi Gras to this costume and to have it be so on-theme.
Okay, there you have it, that's a whole lot of insight into my thought processes when I'm designing these elaborate costumes. It's something I'm seriously thinking about all year! You better believe I've already got my costume for next Mardi Gras all planned out; I'm already buying junk for it. Can't wait!