Costume Designer's Goals
Costume design is the most personal aspect of design.The costume designer must create clothes for characters that, on the onehand, reflect the ideas and goals of the play, but, on the other hand shouldlook like the character chose the clothing in the same way you choose yoursevery day. Similarly, because we all wear clothes but probably donot design houses, audiences and actors will make strong, personal associationswith what a character is wearing on stage.
The costume designer's goals are similar to the set designer's goals.These goals can be broken into five categories: costumes should helpestablish tone and style, time and place, and character information, andcostumes should aid the performer and coordinate with the director's andother designers' concepts.
Costumes give information on the tone and style of a play.They may look just like what we wear today, or they may look like whatpeople really wore at the time in which the play is set. Both ofthese would be illusionistic costuming. On the other hand,costumes might be representative of an idea in the play; for example,actors costumed in robes or unitards of various colors will establish atheatricalstyle. A different, stylized approach to costuming might also usesome period elements mixed with contemporary dress; this would givethe audience a flavor of a historical period without trying to create afull, theatrical illusion of another time and place.
Costumes tell us a great deal about the time and place in whicha play is set.
Dresses with an empire waist made of light fabrics in light colors placeus in the early 18th century, such as in Jane Austin's novels. Bluejeans with bell bottoms and painted or embroidered with many bright colorstell us a character belongs in the late 1960's.
Costumes give us information on individual characters,on the relationships among characters, and on groups of characters.First consider your own wardrobe, and what you would choose to wear ona job interview, on a big date, to wash the car, or to come to class.What you wear says a great deal about who you are and about what you areintending to do. The same is true on the stage, but on stage we makeeven more associations with a character's clothing because we know it isspecifically chosen for the play. If we see a woman on stage in abright red dress, we will make associations with the dress's cut and color.For example, we might decide that the character is dressed for a nighton the town. We might associate either passion and love with thered color, or perhaps blood and violence, or perhaps images of the devil.If other characters on stage wear subdued tones or cool colors, then thecharacter in red will contrast with the other characters. On theother hand, other characters in shades of red will be visually linked thecharacter in the red dress. Similarly, characters will be visuallylinked on stage if they wear clothing with similar silhouettes or colors.
The costume designer works closely with actors. He designscostumes for that specific actor's body as much as for the role the actoris playing. For example, if a designer had planned the red dressmentioned above for the central female character in a play, but the directorcasts a woman with orange hair and freckles, the red dress will no longerhave the intended effect when worn by that actress. A more complimentarycolor will be chosen. Similarly, costumes can be used to enhancean actor's height, girth, natural coloring or to draw attention to anypart of the actor. In the end, the actor must be comfortable wearingher costume: the work of the actor and of the designer can be underminedif an actor is uncomfortable in the clothing or does not know how to wearit and move in it correctly. For example, actors today must practicewalking around in full length, hooped skirts or in a top hat and tailsso that the character can appear to the audience to be comfortable in suchclothing.
Finally, the costume designer must support the director's conceptand must work with the other designers to create a coordinated visualeffect.
Costume Designer's Tools
Like the set designer, the costume designer has two sets of tools:the elements of visual design and the practical material needed to createcostumes.
As discussed in the last chapter, the elements of visual design areline, mass, composition, space, color, and texture. The costume designeruses the design elements somewhate differently from a set designer.The first important element of a costume is its silhouette, whichcombines its line and mass.
Silhouette is the fastest way to identify the time and place of a periodcostume. Silhouette also tells what parts of the body are emphasized,hidden, or displayed by the clothing. Contrast a Restoration woman'ssilhouette with a woman dressed to go out today: the Restorationwoman wore an enormous skirt with underskirts and panniers to increaseits mass yet wore a bodice with an extremely low, wide neckline; the womantoday might wear a mini skirt, heels, and blouse emphasizing the lengthof her legs. The Restoration woman would never show her legs, whilefew contemporary women would dare wear a Restoration neckline.
A costume designer considers composition on several differentlevels. She composes a single costume, she creates a compositionof a single character over the duration of the play, and she composes howthe entire cast should look when on stage together at any moment of theplay. Usually a central character will change radically through theplay's action (Oedipus blinds himself, Nora in A Doll House decidesto leave her husband) and the character's successive costumes should showthe character's evolution. Factors that a costume designer considerswhen composing the costuming of the entire cast might include putting theleading characters in more noticable clothing, working within a restrictedcolor pallette, or demonstrating relationships among characters throughsilhouette or color so that some look good and some silly together.
Space is less a factor for costume designers than set designers,because their canvas is always the human body. Color in costumesfunctions similarly to color in set design; it has its four properties,we associate certain colors with comedy versus tragedy or with other kindsof moods, and color must be used with less subtlety than in life to compensatefor the distance between audience and actors.
Texture in costume is slightly different from set design. Thefirst element of texture is in the fabric itself: satins are smooth andshiny while lace is light and highly textured and tweed is heavy and highlytextured. On the stage, plastics, leathers, furs, feathers, and othermaterials may also be combined with fabric.
Two dimensional texture is provided by the fabrics' patterns: paisley,plaid, and polka dots have a busy visual texture, for example. Manycostumes are composed of multiple fabrics making up multiple articles ofclothing plus accessories, making an elaborate visual texture.
Movement is an element of visual design only in art forms thatmove through time (video, film, theatre, kinetic sculpture) Costumes mustmove with an actor through space, and the amount of movement should reflectthe character and action of the play. Light or loosely woven fabricsmove more freely than heavy or tightly woven fabrics or than other costumematerials like leather or plastic. Consider the Romantic ballerina's tealength tutu of gauze versus the armor worn in a Shakespearean history play.
Practical Tools
In a more practical sense, the tools of the costume designer are thefabricsor other materials out of which costumes may be created; the variousmethods of putting costumes together, such as sewing machines orhot glue guns;
and the bodies of the actors themselves, because no costume willmake it onto the stage without an actor in character in it.
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