Designing Stage Costumes

This is an invaluable guide for anyone who designs, or aspires to design, costumes for stage productions. It explains the role of the costume designer, from understanding the script to realizing ideas on paper and in fabric. Among the topics covered are art and design materials; exercises for developing drawing skills; script and character analysis; the theater production process; and approaches to historical and modern dress productions. This excellent guide is complete with a fabric dictionary of textiles and their terms. Gary Thorne designs for repertory theater in Canada, England, and France. He is also the author of Stage Design: A Practical Guide.

Effective costume design is a subtle art, for the impact of stage dress can immediately convey historical perspective, insights into individual characters, and a visual complement to the setting. The author, whose years of experience as a costume designer have made him a master of the craft, examines every detail of the complex process. From script to production, the author guides the reader towards a complete understanding of costume design, in a work encompassing critical, aesthetic, practical, and historical viewpoints.

Written for the use of students and practitioners in the amateur and professional worlds of today's theatre, this handbook covers every aspect of a costume designer's work from preliminary sketches and discussions with a producer to cutting and trying on for Shakespeare and modern plays.

Unbuttoned: The Art and Artists of Theatrical Costume Design documents the creative journey of costume creation from concept to performance. Each chapter provides an overview of the process, including designing and shopping; draping, cutting, dyeing, and painting; and beading, sewing, and creating embellishments and accessories. This book features interviews with practitioners from Broadway and regional theatres to opera and ballet companies, offering valuable insights into the costume design profession. Exceptional behind-the-scenes photography illustrates top costume designers and craftspeople at work, along with gorgeous costumes in progress.

Written by a well-known costume designer, this book is for anyone who would like to create costumes for the theater, whatever their experience or their budget. Topics include understanding the structure and work of a theater company; making the best use of production meetings; coping with budgets; decoding the costume clues in a script; setting up and equipping a workroom; finding costumes at thrift shops and flea markets; altering modern clothes for period productions; using and adapting commercial patterns; and developing simple sewing skills. Tina Bicât has worked as a costume designer for The Royal National Theatre, The New York City Ballet, The English National Opera, as well as for fringe theater groups, television, and film.

Costume is an active agent for performance-making; it is a material object that embodies ideas shaped through collaborative creative work. A new focus in recent years on research in the area of costume has connected this practice in vital and new ways with theories of the body and embodiment, design practices, artistic and other forms of collaboration. Costume, like fashion and dress, is now viewed as an area of dynamic social significance and not simply as passive reflector of a pre-conceived social state or practice. This book offers new approaches to the study of costume, as well as fresh insights into the better-understood frames of historical, theoretical, practice-based and archival research into costume for performance. This anthology draws on the experience of a global group of established researchers as well as emerging voices. Below is a list of just some of the things it achieves: 1. Introduces diverse perspectives, innovative new research methods and approaches for researching design and the costumed body in performance. 2. Contributes towards a new understanding of how costume actually 'performs' in time and space. 3. Offers new insights into existing practices, as well as creating a space of connection between practitioners and researchers from design, the humanities and social sciences.

"In this comprehensive and beautifully illustrated volume, accomplished costume designer Dierdre Clancy draws from her decades of experience to show how to design costume for stage and screen. All budgets and practicalities are considered so whether you are a student, or a designer for the stage or screen, this book has advice from one of the best in the business" --Back cover.