Costume Design: The Basics

T.M. Delligatti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000176384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Stagecraft & Scenography

Costume Design: The Basics provides an overview of the fundamental principles of theatrical costume design, from pre-production through opening night.

Beginning with a discussion of what is costume design, why do people wear clothes, and what is the role of the costume designer, this book makes accessible the art and practice of costume design. Peppered with interviews with working costume designers, it provides an understanding of what it means to be a costume designer and offers a strong foundation for additional study. Readers will learn:

• How to use clues from the script to decipher a character's wardrobe

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• Methods used to sketch ideas using traditional or digital media

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• How to discuss a concept with a team of directors, producers, and designers

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• Strategies to use when collaborating with a professional costume shop

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• How to maintain a healthy work/life balance

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• Courses of action when working under a limited money and labor budget.

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Costume Design: The Basics is an ideal starting point for aspiring designers looking for ways to achieve the best costumes on stage and realize their vision into a visual story told through clothing.

1

Text Analysis and Research

The foundation of all theater, film, and television is the story. Every choice a costume designer makes is in service to it. Those stories come in many forms. Authors can pen scripts; the stories can be improvised; or they can be devised by actors, designers, writers, choreographers, and artists all together. Whichever form a story takes, a costume designer must know it intimately, for designers give color and life to the words. Theater, film, and television are about the experience of being immersed in a world that evokes thought and emotion. Each person that works on these projects contributes a piece of that world that is brought together to create a story for other people to enjoy. It is why this art form is labeled as collaborative. In order to do good work, a costume designer must understand how stories affect an audience’s emotions.

The best place to begin is to dive into a script and figure out what makes characters interesting. There are many different ways a story is structured; not all of them have a concrete beginning, middle, and end. Some are told in a more abstract way, focusing on themes and movement rather than plot. The following sections will explore four types of storytelling a costume designer will commonly interact with: Scripts, improvisation, devised theater, and dance.

How to Read a Script

When working in commercial theater, most plays will be produced from a script, usually written by an individual or a team. When the designers are hired, they are given that script to read and analyze before the meetings begin.

A common practice for costume designers is to read the script no less than three times—once for entertainment, once to make notes on themes and ideas, and once to think in practical terms of the production.

The first reading is for the designer’s own enjoyment. The idea is that it lets the designer experience the story as a whole. In this read, the designer can make notes about how the story makes them feel (Example: “It’s a somber play. The whole story has a deep sense of melancholy”), about what they think of the characters and their choices (“The main character never seemed to learn from his mistakes, which is why the play ended in tragedy”), and what the story tries to say to the audience (“The play is a cautionary tale about the dangers of isolating yourself from your friends and family”). These feelings give a designer a sense of the mood and tone of both the play and the characters.

First reads also give the designer a sense of the perspective and how the audience will experience the story when they watch the show. The design team may read a show dozens of times and watch it a dozen more over the course of a production, causing that initial emotional reaction to diminish. After so many reads, jokes may not seem funny anymore. The surprise twist may seem too obvious. As a consequence, the designer might try to rework the show to feel new again. Remembering that first read will remind the designer what the show is supposed to feel like.

The second reading requires an analytical approach to the text. The goal is to fully understand the characters and how they fit into the story. It’s also beneficial to know the work’s intent, meaning, and themes. A theme is a message the storyteller wants to communicate.

In Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s 1740 book La Belle et la Bête (translated in English as Beauty and the Beast) one of the themes is inner beauty opposing the outward appearance of a monster. The character Beauty learns to love the Beast in spite of his grotesque appearance. In Molière’s Tartuffe, the theme of hypocrisy is highlighted by titular character, Tartuffe. Tartuffe is a man who professes purity and other religious values, but his actions are motivated by greed and lust.

New designers and students may wonder how themes of a story are relevant to costume design if the setting and the characters are already known. Using themes can give a design a sense of sincerity. When people consume a piece of fiction in any form—books, theater, movies, video games, TV shows—they bring with them a tolerance level for which they are able to accept unrealistic, exaggerated, or surreal elements. This is called suspension of disbelief. Storytellers and designers must convince a crowd to believe in monsters, ghosts, true love, or complicated murder plots. How does a designer do that through costumes?

Authenticity

Costumes need to feel authentic to the world they inhabit. Audiences can be made to accept the surreal if the world feels like it could logically exist within the rules set up by the story. For example, a sword-and-sorcery fantasy may have dragons and magic, but it’s world is usually grounded in something real. In this case, these stories often utilize variations on a medieval aesthetic. Too much deviation from that aesthetic could feel out of place, breaking immersion. The costumes must feel like the characters in the world can believably buy, make, or use the clothing they wear. How much is too much deviation, though? That line is not always clear. Returning to the core themes reveals what’s most important to a story, which can act as a designer’s guide: What is the story about? Will this choice support it?

Revealing Character through Costume

To illustrate how the same type of character can be designed in different ways to portray different themes and ideas, the following will look at various characterizations of a doctor character.

The Shakespeare play Macbeth has a doctor character in a minor role. A design is possible with this limited information—depending on the period when the show is set, a costume designer can dress the character in typical doctor garb and be done with it, but the costume design can go further with characterization. While reading the script, the designer should make notes about other characterization clues and how that might affect the costume.

Breaking down the script during the read-through can reveal volumes about the inner workings of a character: What kind of doctor is this character? Surgeon? OB-GYN? Pediatrician? This can change the style of coat, color of the scrubs, or what tools the doctor carries. In Macbeth, the character is Macbeth’s personal physician in charge of treating Lady Macbeth as she descends into madness. How old is the doctor? How much experience do they have? What is their general personality? This can change the style and cut of the hair, what accessories the doctor wears, whether they have tattoos, wear a smartwatch, wear stilettos, and so on. What country is the doctor from? Where is the story set? Lab coats can vary in cut and color by country; sometimes, no lab coat is worn at all. What is the time period? A doctor in seventeenth-century Italy could wear a plague mask and a long robe while a nineteenth-century doctor in the United States might wear only an apron over their daywear. During the read-through, the designer can notate these questions which will act as a reference point during the research phase.

These questions add some depth, but the designer can go even deeper. The next step is to consider the character’s motivation and intent: How does the story identify the characters? What is the author trying to say about their actions? What role does the character play in the story?

In another show with a doctor, the doctor’s actions may be painted as misguided, clever, or as the result of hubris, such as Dr. Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The character’s role in the story could be that of a cautionary tale to others. Or the doctor could be portrayed as devoted, concerned, and inquisitive, as in the previously mentioned doctor from Macbeth. A designer can use the color, shape, line, and texture of a costume to reinforce these ideas present in the script. This will make the character feel more fleshed out.

The following describes a basic foundation of how a change in costume can alter the way a character is perceived. The images shown in Figure 1.1 both show a “doctor,” but both are characterized on two ends of a spectrum. The characters are the same in that they both serve the same role (that of a doctor), but the details are what make them distinct individuals.

Figure 1.1An image of two theoretical doctor characters, dressed according to specific traits and personalities.

The image on the left communicates a character that is messy or careless, with intentions that might not be the purest. An audience doesn’t associate excessive blood stains with a conscientious doctor, even if it happens in real life. The image on the right shows a doctor who could be clean and fastidious. Or it could denote arrogance. The head wrap indicates a possible region of birth or a religion that the doctor practices. Clothing choices change the nature of a character; learning the inner and outer particulars will produce a strong design. Exploring broad characters can be good practice for beginners. Over time, a designer can explore subtler techniques to create more nuanced characters.

Finally, after the designer thoroughly understands the script in-and-out, top-to-bottom, it is time for the third read-through. Scripts can be so dense that it requires multiple reads to catch everything. Subtle lines of dialogue may not seem related to costuming initially but could be crucial to the design. Take a line like, “I play the violin every evening in the symphony.” It might seem like this is more an interesting bit of characterization than something that directly affects costumes, but someone who knows the violin will know that this character needs natural, functional nails. Violins can only be effectively played with short nails. If this line is overlooked and the designer dresses this character in an evening gown with nails to match, the actor won’t be able to believably play the role.

The third read-through is also the time to create the necessary paperwork and plan out any practical concerns that arise. The costume plot is created in this phase, which will be addressed in detail in the next chapter. If characters need to change costumes in quick succession, this is the time to make note so the designer can integrate any solutions into the design at the start.

A Further Study into Themes

To break down a story and find the themes, one can start with the broad, general questions: Is the show a comedy, tragedy, mystery, musical, or other genre? What are the setting and the time period? Who are the characters?

As an example, the following is a break down of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap:

Genre: Mousetrap is a whodunit mystery

Setting: Mid-20th century England in a bed and breakfast during a snowstorm.

Characters: The lead characters are Mollie Ralston, the lady of the house; Giles Ralston, her husband, etc.

The above facts set a foundation. The next layer is to research the context of the story—did historical events influence the story? Many plays are written with some kind of historical grounding even if the events in the show are fantastical. Sometimes, an author’s personal history colors the plot.

The Mousetrap is based on the real-life case of Dennis O’Neill, a young Welsh boy who was killed at the hands of his foster parents in 1945.

Next is to look for a subject the story revolves around. What subject is the story addressing?

In The Mousetrap, many characters are affected by childhood neglect, either indirectly or directly, and they all deal with the consequences in their own ways. Some ignore the role they played in the neglect and some are so deeply hurt by it that they’ve vowed to take revenge.

A common theme of many Whodunit mysteries is that of judging people by their outward appearance, and The Mousetrap is no exception. When the murder happens, it is up to the audience and the characters to figure out which character is the murderer.

In terms of costuming, these themes can be communicated in a few ways. The characters’ feelings of guilt might mean they ...