Practical, informative guidebook shows how to create everything from short tunics worn by Saxon men in the fifth century to a lady's bustle dress of the late 1800s. 81 illustrations.
A History of the Theatre Costume Business is the first-ever comprehensive book on the subject, as related by award-winning actors and designers, and first hand by the drapers, tailors, and craftspeople who make the clothes that dazzle on stage. Readers will learn why stage clothes are made today, by whom, and how. They will also learn how today’s shops and ateliers arose from the shops and makers who founded the business. This never-before-told story shows that there is as much drama behind the scenes as there is in the performance: famous actors relate their intimate experiences in the fitting room, the glories of gorgeous costumes, and the mortification when things go wrong, while the costume makers explain how famous shows were created with toil, tears, and sweat, and sometimes even a little blood. This is history told by the people who were present at the creation – some of whom are no longer around to tell their own story. Based on original research and first-hand reporting, A History of the Theatre Costume Business is written for theatre professionals: actors, directors, producers, costume makers, and designers. It is also an excellent resource for all theatregoers who have marveled at the gorgeous dresses and fanciful costumes that create the magic on stage, as well as for the next generation of drapers and designers.
Hunnisett provides comprehensive and complete detailed instruction for creating authentic-looking costumes from the Middle Ages through 1500. Includes over 200 drawings, patterns, and photographs.
Shirley Miles O'Donnol provides both illustrations and written descriptions of styles worn in everyday life and suggests ways of adapting them to stage use. Her animated and informative text gives an overview of social trends as well as insight into the fashions themselves. Since women's fashions change more frequently and more radically than men's, the chapters follow the eras in women's apparel: "The First World War," "The Flaming Twenties," "The Depressed Thirties," "The Second World War," "The Postwar Era and the 'New Look,'" "The Late Fifties: Dawn of the Space Age," and "The Sixties: Unisex and Miniskirts." Lavishly illustrated with original drawings by the author, photographs of costumes now in museum collections, and drawings and photographs taken from fashion magazines spanning more than fifty years, American Costume, 1915-1970 is a practical -- and entertaining -- handbook for the stage costumer.
An amazing resource book filled with detailed costume patterns to trace, cut out and assemble. The patterns illustrated range from Ancient Egypt to 1915 and include trims and accessories. The basic pattern shapes allow the designer's creativity free range. Gowns tunics, headdresses, jackets, robes breeches - the patterns will produce an accurate silhouette for each time period, leaving the costumer free to explore variations of cut and surface embellishment within an historic framework. Holkeboar also gives step-by-step instructions for making corsets and hoop petticoats, hats, crowns, and even masks and wigs. The patterns are multiple-sized and easy to adapt and elaborate upon so they may be used opver and over again to create a completely different look each time beause you add the all-important details. The basics are here - just add inspiration!
Transform common people into superheroes, movie stars, witches -- whatever illusion you want to create. Creative costuming is all in the details. One garment can take on many totally different looks depending on how you accessorise it. Over the years, the author has learned all the tricks about how anyone can turn leftover clothing into fabulous costumes. This book's numerous drawings explain in detail the costuming process of 'turning straw into gold'. It shows you how to design illusions that you never thought possible. Yes, you can easily do all this -- and at a minimum expense! This is another Barb Rogers must have book for your library of costume ideas.
"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.
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.
Winner of Best Performance Design and Scenography Publication Award, Prague Quadrennial 2019 This beautifully illustrated book conveys the centrality of costume to live performance. Finding associations between contemporary practices and historical manifestations, costume is explored in six thematic chapters, examining the transformative ritual of costuming; choruses as reflective of society; the grotesque, transgressive costume; the female sublime as emancipation; costume as sculptural art in motion; and the here-and-now as history. Viewing the material costume as a crucial aspect in the preparation, presentation and reception of live performance, the book brings together costumed performances through history. These range from ancient Greece to modern experimental productions, from medieval theatre to modernist dance, from the 'fashion plays' to contemporary Shakespeare, marking developments in both culture and performance. Revealing the relationship between dress, the body and human existence, and acknowledging a global as well as an Anglo and Eurocentric perspective, this book shows costume's ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary borders. Through it, we come to question the extent to which the material costume actually co-authors the performance itself, speaking of embodied histories, states of being and never-before imagined futures, which come to life in the temporary space of the performance. With a contribution by Melissa Trimingham, University of Kent, UK
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.