What Is a Theater Costume

Ester Krumbachová

WHAT IS A THEATER COSTUME?

Each person dresses in a way that corresponds to his individual disposition, taste, and way of thinking. The distinctive clothing of each individual need not be perfectly expressive at first glance. When we walk down the street, the clothes of the people we meet seem very similar in both their cut and their colors, which come and go with the fashion. Of course, when we take a closer look, we find that, despite their external similarity, they differ from each other not in their cut or color, but in the significance that people attribute to the individual elements of their clothing.
Placed on the head of different women, the very same hat changes its expression: sometimes it is positioned as though not wanting to draw attention to itself, while at other times it comes off as affected and conspicuous. It is this expression that must be tracked above all else, all the way down to its psychological cause.
Note the old woman with a sloppy, sadly comical haircut, and decipher it correctly: you find that it’s a haircut form 1928, deformed beyond all recognition, left over from her former personality, to which she continues to cling out of habit or loss of interest in the present.
Look at how that man ties his tie, his scarf, how he wears his hat or cap. Once you spend a lot of time on this sort of observation, you learn the similarities and differences between people. You then come to understand that a theater costume, too, is not just a set of clothes or a fashionable design. A collar or neckline does not stand in relation to the character of its owner, but rather the opposite. A theater costume is the emphasized totality of the clothing of a particular person that must in every case harmonize with the stage and even complement it, so that the overall impression is one of certain unity.
When we first speak with the director about his goals and the construction of costumes, we often have nice but vague ideas that we sometimes erroneously consider decisive. When we transfer these ideas to a specific drawing and color, we often learn that their shape and color were nowhere near clear, and we have to put in a lot of careful work to achieve a precise, material result.
The tailors and seamstresses who receive designs are responsible for realizing our designs, and they must have a clear sense, from our drawings and from our conversations with them, of how to proceed.
A designer must have at least a basic understanding of sewing, and must always consult with the tailor in detail about the pattern and the whole system of tailoring the costume in general. To be clear: we can design a hoopskirt, but we must know whether it should be pleated, sewn together from parts, or narrowed into tucks at the waist; whether it will be made from tulle, brocade, satin, or some contemporary dress fabric. The hoopskirt is the same, but in each case, the way we make it achieves a very different result.
Of course, this does not mean that a costume designer should draw details of the costume’s cut directly onto the design. A design should always give off a pleasant whiff of the character it depicts, and matters of tailoring drawn onto it could needlessly damage the whole effect. It is thus better for the design to draw out the pattern or certain specific issues in detail, or to consult in detail with the tailor and seamstress; the latter usually suffices.
The work of a painter has one royal privilege: it lasts. We can look at a painting for an hour, a day, or a minute, and nothing about it changes. That is, time has no influence on the value of the work of a painter.
The shape and color of a theater costume exist in an entirely opposite sense. We cannot consider it apart from time, movement, its momentary or total disappearance at the moment when the actor leaves the stage, or total shifts in color composition when actors are rearranged on the stage. Actors do not stand in one place; thus, shapes and colors do not stand in one place either. Some characters are on the stage for the entire time, while others appear for a moment and leave once more. From this, it follows that time is one of the main factors under consideration when we develop a concept: how fine or forceful a detail a character can bear, what simplifications are needed, which colors we bestow upon a protagonist and which upon a side character.
A costume that will be on the stage for twenty minutes must be different from a costume that simply flashes by it. We must keep this fact in mind even at the beginning stages of the design process. We can help ourselves by taking designs for a character – say, a girl who walks across the stage once or twice – and placing it in front of our eyes for just a short moment, in order to determine whether the costume is weighed down by gratuitous details that we do not have time to perceive, and whether it is distinct enough in its basic silhouette, which must harmonize with the main characters of the play. On the other hand, in the case of the protagonist, who will be on the stage the longest, we sometimes leave it in front of our eyes for a whole work session, in order to determine whether its range of colors does not come off as too sharp after a time or become unpleasant and obtrusive, and whether we have given the protagonist the right degree of fine details, which the audience will begin to perceive after some amount of time.
Colors and their interactions, shapes and their interactions, must be learned carefully from both modern and old painters. A good painting does not contain coincidences or lack of clarity; shapes and forms are not placed next to one another randomly, but with intention, in an effort to express oneself clearly and purely. We then begin to learn that every color either becomes muddled or brightens up in the vicinity of another color, that shapes influence one another and support their strength of expression.
The strength of expression of colors and their interactions are hidden just like in musical notes. Of course, eight notes placed next to one another at random mean nothing, just like eight colors placed next to one another by chance. It is intention, creative effort, which turns notes into a melody and colors into a composition capable of expressing a wide variety of resonances of a play, situations, and psychological processes.
Thus, making good costumes is not a matter of finding a different shape and color for each character, but rather, on the contrary, of finding a basic formcorresponding to the play’s meaning and the director’s intentions, and then merely altering and developing this unifying form through use of a color, its aesthetic, and its ability to have a psychological effect on audiences.
Understandably, there is much more that could be said about theater costumes. What was said here was intended to gesture, roughly and summarily, towards an overall outline of this work and roughly define a few important points, which each practitioner does in their own way.
There are no recipes or instructions according to which a designer must act. It is not true that white is innocence and black is sin, it is not true that a historical character must have a velvet cape and a hat with a feather. Conventions are not true. If the whole history of human culture and civilization were not full of a steady procession of new worldview, we would still be walking around today in coarse kirtles and living in stilt houses. We must approach our work as pioneers: not imitating what we have seen a hundred times before, not being bound by conventions, but educating ourselves and working honestly; respecting the director, the play’s meaning, and the actors’ performances – but doing all this freely and independently, following our convictions and our own worldview.