#dowager costumer of techblr

[costumersupportdept]

Hello! It’s the fledgling back again with a question this time. Can you recommend me any photographic resources for early 1900’s corsets and what sort of decoration they may have had?

Sure thing! Once of my favorite sources is always the V&A. (Victoria and Albert Museum, in London) and they have a whole online site about early 1900s corsets: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/c/corsets-early-20th-century/

I would also say troll through their online collections (i just searched “corset” and it gave me all these, so be sure to check their dates before you fall in love: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/search/?q=corset

Other museums I would trust are the Kyoto Costume Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Met Museum. You should be able to do a decent collection search at any of those. 

Also, don’t be afraid to look at real books! I wind up buying a lot of them as reference, (I can write them off on my taxes for work!) but there’s no shame in the library either-especially if you’re attached to an academic library, I know the V&A has put out a corset specific book from their collections, and there are a few more that have been assembled by wandering curators from many collections. 

Pinterest as a last resort-if you can find museum pieces there that are well documented and have an actual date, go for it, but so much of Pinterest is common-curated (or NOT curated at all) that unless you really know what you’re looking at, you can get misled a lot. 

Hope that helps!

[costumersupportdept]

Do you or any of your followers have tips on finding costume jobs in NYC? I’ve just moved and am feeling a little lost

I don’t, as I have avoided NYC with all my might for a myriad of reasons. 

The folks I know who have really flourished there are mostly wardrobe types, and they’ve all said that if you can get in (which is the hard part) and you get the reputation of being a hard worker with some common sense, wardrobe heads will start pitching you back and forth (one of my friends works on like, one actual show and three others as a swing dresser.)

As far as stitching jobs, I have almost no idea. I get the impression it’s “be in the right place at the right time,” “know people,” or “wait for someone to die,” but if anyone else has insight, tag it here!

[costumersupportdept]

It probably varies from person to person, but would you say it's worth it to go to school/grad school for technical theatre or would it be enough to get experience at community theatres/find an internship and go for it?

It really depends on what you want to do and how good your pre-existing network is. I wanted to teach, so I sort of needed the MFA, especially if I want to be faculty somewhere someday. 

If you’re a good student/you like “school” and all that comes with it, I would think it would probably be worth you going to college at a place that has a good reputation for technical theater, but my caveat would be that IMO, you should NOT go to a conservatory school. I was at grad school with conservatory-type undergrads, and they were literally the worst-rounded folks I’ve ever run into at a university. There’s something about having to be able to write and debate literature and know how biology works at a college level that will always come back to help you ESPECIALLY in technical theater-if you’re doing props you’ll have a basic idea of different science flasks, if you’re doing electrics you’ll have run into literary descriptions of different lighting and had to think about them, if you’re in costumes, good god, history classes are literally half the backbone of what we do. 

If you’re not a “studenty” person, I think the internship/apprenticeship route might be the way to go, but be aware that since folks are so primed to think of college as the font of all knowledge, you may have a harder time getting in/finding one. I would also say that unless you live somewhere with just exceptional community theater, I would aim a little higher-I would try for the internship with a bigger place to learn, as opposed to the community theater where you might be in charge, but might be making it up as you go (which, to be fair, we all do on some level, but usually with some previous experience behind it) 

I know PCPA in CA does some actual apprenticeship type programs, and the IATSE union (although sometimes hard to break into) does a fair number in some cities, but in others may just put you on the list as a box pusher for load in/load outs and let you sort of work your way up (if you’re in a city that doesn’t have a formal IATSE hierarchy like NYC or LA, you’ll have a chance to meet and talk to a lot of folks-TALK TO THE PEOPLE DOING WHAT YOU WANT TO DO-make sure you know the riggers if you want to rig, or the sound folks if you want to do sound, and if you show up on time and work reasonably cheerfully, you’ll start getting asked if you want to help with other more specific non-box pushing stuff) 

As far as grad school, there are a lot of opinions. The one I give most often is to actually go DO what you want to do before you do grad school. If you’re a costumer, go work as a stitcher/shopper/assistant for 1-2 years before you commit to grad school, because not only does it look better, but you start to learn where your focus really is and lets you “specialize” better if you want to. Also, keep in mind that while MFAs are becoming more and more required to work in academia, and more and more common in higher level theaters, they’re not yet a formal requirement to work a lot of places, and a lot of places also try to promote from within, so at this point with enough experience you still can (at this point) work your way up to TD or ME someday even if you come from being Joe Screw Turner on the floor. 

[costumersupportdept]

Oh buddy. Oh little buddy arguing with me on the USITT facebook page.

They clearly posted a meme about payment saying “for the costume designers hahahahahah!” to which I responded, “what about the costume technicians, who are underpaid AND forgotten?” and this bag of entitled man-flesh in a suit responded with “this is a volunteer organization, if they’re not serving your needs, you ought to join the commission and help change that.”

Oh buddy, no. 

First, my posted response to you: remembering costume technicians should not be a hard task for the UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF THEATER TECHNOLOGY. For god’s sake, we may not number a million and we may not get big awards (which, like, get me started on THAT some other day) but to “forget” we exist and continually lump us in as “costume designers” is like saying oh, every TD is also a paint charge. Just because they often work in the same space doesn’t frigging mean that they do the same thing. 

My second response to you, I would frigging LOVE to be on a commission. But do you know what that takes? Time and money. Back to that underpaid thing-I don’t currently get paid enough to go to USITT every year, as much as I want to. Why? Because for whatever reason, costume techs are valued less than costume designers. Most schools that I work at or could work at class me as staff, not as faculty, meaning automatically I make $20,000 less that I could be with my terminal degree. I clear my bills in a month and save money for my christmas plane ticket home and that’s pretty much it. 

Also, because I’m staff supporting an 8 show season, I open a new show literally every three weeks. Tell me when in there I’m supposed to “commission” for USITT? Is it on my weekends? Because half of those are work calls or show calls too, because see above, I don’t get paid enough and so I work IATSE dresser jobs when I get called for them to bring in a little extra money. 

So fuck you, white bread in a suit, for telling me I have to do the labor of changing an organization who should already be doing better than this. Don’t pin your entitled male need for the status quo on me and then tell me to do MORE work to make it better for myself. You get out there and start recognizing costume techs and costume tech erasure and the underpayment of costume shop staff and THEN maybe I’ll have the time and the support I need to follow your asinine suggestions. Until then though, I’m going to ignore your Man Ego Issues like we ALL ALWAYS HAVE TO, and continue agitating for change in the ways I’m able to. 

[costumersupportdept]

Seasonal PSA from your Local Costume Professional:

Since this is the time of year that families gather and Dead Grandma's Stuff needs to be dealt with, while we appreciate the fact that fur coats come with a whole lot of emotional baggage around dead animals and cruelty and you want them to be used/reused to make it seem 'more OK,' you are not the first person to feel this, OR to think "hey, donating this to a theater costume shop would be great! furs are expensive and I bet they'd love to have this!"

Most theaters I've worked in are well overstocked on fur coats, fur stoles, fur collars, fur lined gloves and the like. The sad truth is that they really don't get used on stage all that much, because they're REALLY WARM and REALLY HARD TO CLEAN, which is not a great combination when dealing with sweaty actors wearing greasepaint on the daily. Furs are also hard to store well in our often limited storage spaces, and take up a LOT of room.

Unless your fur is in pristine condition and immediately wearable, please don't give them to us. Instead, may I point you in the direction of "Coats for Cubs," run by the Humane Society and retailer Buffalo Exchange, or urge you to contact any local wildlife rehab center, and ask if they'd like your fur coat to help baby animals get back into the wild.

xoxo, the Costumer Support Department.

[costumersupportdept]

So I went to grad school in Massachusetts and paid to live by teaching small children to swim. One of every class’s favorite games was red light green light, because it let them kick up big splashes and get me all wet. (I mean, joke’s on them, I’m standing in the pool in front of them already, but whatever.)

So I start out by asking,” what do we do at a green light?” and they all get “go” and I ask what do we do at a red light? and they all get “stop”

Then I ask “what do we do at a yellow light?” because most of this game is actually to try to get them kicking at yellow light speed, which is where they have the best form, and I swear to god, all four of them in unison yelled, “SPEED UP!”

highways in Massachusetts do this really cool thing where a lane will just abruptly disappear at inopportune times (right after highway entry ramps, in roundabouts, etc). half the time the sign warning you of this is placed basically where the lane ends anyways and the other half there just isnt a sign at all. there’s a part of my commute where the road goes from three lanes to one in 500 feet with no signs

[costumersupportdept]

Forgive me if this is a dumb question: How many people (and jobs) does it take to costume a show? Whats the process? I just had a costume fitting and was wondering about this.

HOKAY SO, buckle in kidlets, because this could be a long one. 

FIRST, the short answer: DEPENDS ON THE SHOP. 

NOW, the long answer: 

In most shops you will have, 1 costume designer 1 shop manager, 1-6 cutter/draper/tailors, 1-6 first hands and 1-12 stitchers. From there, you could also add a design assistant, a rentals manager, a craftsperson and/or a crafts assistant, and even a set of VERY SPECIALIZED craftspeople like armorers, cobblers, dyers, milliners, jewelers, etc. 

So, if you’re The Ultimate Costume Shop Who’s Just Won The Lottery, you could logically have 30 people in the shop at any given time. (I would hazard a guess that OSF probably runs close to this-I’m willing to bet that they have 5 or 6 teams working at any point, not including craftspeople.)

BUT TEKA, WHO’S ON A TEAM?Glad you asked, Yelly Self. A “team” in a shop is generally made up of three or four people. 

1)Cutter/Draper/Tailor. (This is sort of an amorphous term, which if unpacked, is a whole other post that basically boils down to “well, what technique do you mostly use and/or what do you call yourself?”) This person leads the team, and is in charge of making all of the patterns for the garments and figuring out how they’re going to go together to give the designer what they want. They then hand patterns off to the: 

2) First Hand. This person takes the patterns and actually cuts them out of the fabric, figures out how the whole thing more or less works, and assembles parts packets that include all the bits you need to put it together. That packet then goes to the 

3) Stitchers, who, well, stitch it all together. 

Usually a team is 1 draper, 1 first hand and 1-2 stitchers. For the most part, a draper can do any of the positions, a first hand can cut and stitch, and the stitchers ONLY stitch. However, I’ve met some whizbang stitchers in Seattle who can get a coat together WAY faster than you expect, so stitchers are no slouches in their own right. 

The general process is as follows: 

The designer will come in and they and the shop manager will meet with all the drapers ahead of time about what they’re making. Often the designer has some of the fabrics already, or they know generally what they want. 

The drapers will take this information and the actors’ measurements and go into the Cone of Solitude to make all the patterns for first fittings. (aka they’ll be thinking really hard and kind of snappish if you interrupt them in the middle of The Maths)

First fitting patterns will go to the First Hand who will cut them out of muslin and hand them off to the stitchers to put together. (This patterning/cutting time is also when the designer is generally off shopping fabric, and the shop manager is riding their ass to get the fabric in on time)

At first fitting, the actor comes in and tries on the muslin. The draper climbs all over and fits it to the actor so that it looks like the designer’s sketch/the designer likes it. First hands in this process are generally note-takers. 

The draper takes the fitted muslin and the notes, and alters the original pattern. 

The hope is that after this stage, you’re confident enough to go into the Real Fabric. About 75% of the time, this is true, but once in a while, whether it’s a designer problem or a draper issue, you get stuck at this point in a recursive loop of pattern alterations and fittings until you either get it right or someone gives up… or in the case of Equity, you run out of fitting time.

This altered pattern then goes to the first hand, who cuts it out of the real fabric, assembles the packet of zippers/buttons/interfacings/etc and hands it off to the stitchers…..

….who put it together. 

Granted, this is sort of an idealized setup. In reality, there’s a lot of trading back and forth of things- Stitcher A may not have a good handle on welt pockets, so the draper may take their jacket and do only the welt pockets then hand it back, or you may have a bazillion things to cut to get out to the stitchers (musical theater) so the draper may become a second first hand and help with the cutting.

First hands, after they’re done cutting, become high-powered stitchers, and generally keep tabs on any alterations/pulled garments that are coming through as well, to feed that out to stitchers/interns as possible. 

Most of the time shop managers are former drapers (my feelings on this, another whole separate post about wasting good craftspeople in admin positions) so sometimes if you’re really in the weeds, they’ll come out on the floor and either cut or sew as well. (I had two first hands on Curtains recently, because we had something like 34 garments to get made in two weeks so our shop manager came out and played first hand for me for a while.)

Crafts works much the same way as the draper teams, but with fewer people. In general, crafts gets told “We need a big green hat!” and one of the craftspeople makes a big green hat to a fitting stage, tries it on at the fitting, alters it, and then finishes it themselves. 

The biggest shop like this I’ve worked in has been the Seattle Opera, where we had three teams with two stitchers each and a two person crafts team, and three admin folks (manager, asst. manager, rentals coord) with one designer. 

The smallest shop I’ve worked in has been at my last job, where the entire shop was a designer and me, and I played draper and shop manager all at once. 

There are also other shops that don’t work like this at all- at Michael Curry’s studio, you see a project from beginning to end as a single person, and the crossover is more between departments- I might be acting as dyer and put a gradient down, which then goes to paint to get speckled, which comes back to me as a fabric tech to be cut and sewn into a puppet cover, which then goes out to the sculpting team so they can install it over the armature they have built before it goes to electrics to wire it for movement.

(From here, once you have a finished garment it passes into the realm of Wardrobe, which I’m also happy to cover, but ye gods, if anyone’s read this far, they’ll have to let me know. )

[costumersupportdept]

How Your Costume Shop Works, Edition 4.

From @heartseeswhateyescannot: 

Have you ever worked as a Wardrobe Supervisor? If so could you explain how quick changes are managed? I am a SM and is very interested in the process at any size.

I HAVE worked as a Wardrobe Sup- at the school I work at, each of us in the shop takes turns supervising the student crews that run the shows we put up. 

Usually, we start out early on in the process in the costume shop by trying to figure out where quickchanges are likely to be in any given show. Often, this is working with the director and/or the designer, and there are usually at least a few weeks where we bring up needing to know about them in the production meeting. Ideally, we’d know what/where a quickchange was and about how long we should have to do it before we even start building garments, so if we have to do a special breakaway rig of some sort, we can figure out how to hide it. (This is also true for any clothing that changes onstage-we got sort of blindsided on Curtains last year because one of the leads had to take her own dress off, and we suddenly had to swap the closures from the front to the back to accommodate her)

By the time we get to tech, usually the SMs have given us an entrances/exits chart, or at least a good idea of where the Really Fast Turnarounds are, and we can start setting up the actual changes. 

Usually, I start out by just seeing if we can do the change normally with the wardrober helping, and if that takes too long, I’ll move on to choreographing and throwing extra bodies at the problem. I generally tell the actors that the more they can have OFF by the time they get to us, the more helpful it’s going to be, so if they can have their shirt off or at least open, or their shirt off and their pants undone, we can be ready to swap stuff as soon as we see them. If we get to needing choreography, it’s usually as simple as “pants first, then shirt from behind, step into your shoes, do your snaps/buttons/velcro, take the hat off the head of the person tying your shoes, go onstage.” Really the choreography is to make sure that everyone knows exactly what order stuff happens in, and what’s coming next, so there’s not a whole mess of fumbling (which adds time)

There are also a whole lot of tricks in rigging clothes for quickchanges- depending on if a shirt has to go off or on quickly, we might replace the buttons with velcro(on) or snaps(off) and put elastic in the cuffs. There are a lot of times where you sew a top and a bottom together and put a Gianty Big Zipper down the back to get things off of people quickly, or when you sew a vest to a shirt so that you can put it on all as one unit. Sometimes we also have people underdress things- if you have to go from a big poofy dress into a pencil skirt, we’ll have the pencil skirt on under the big poofy dress, so we can just yank the big poofy dress off and you��ll be ready to go. (there are literally a million different rigging tricks for stuff, so if anyone needs like, Specific Quickrig Ideas, feel free to hit me up)

[costumersupportdept]

Followup 1 to How Your Costume Shop Works:

@addicted-to-nostalgia​ asks “What about specialized things like beading and embroidery on costumes? Are there people who do specifically that?”

Again, the short answer is: sometimes?

I know when you’re talking about things like Game of Thrones and probably other Really Embroidery Heavy movies/tv shows (and I haven’t worked formally on movies/tv yet, just made the occasional thing on contract but I would bet that their costume shop process is pretty much the same as the one I outlined for theater) they have an Official Embroidery Crew, so in that case yes, stuff does go to a completely different group of folks who specialize in just that.

HOWEVER, honestly, embroidery and beading often take a LOT of time, so it’s rare for a theater costume shop to decide to do a lot of them, because it’s the teams themselves that’ll do it, not a specialized person. More often than not, if you’re beading something it’s just little bits, like adding beaded fringe to a 20′s dress, or adding individual bead/sequins/heat set rhinestones to something for light bounce. This is where prebeaded fabrics (as much as they’re a pain in the ass to work with) make all the difference-the time it takes to crack the beads off and secure the ends through the seams is still less than beading the whole thing from scratch. Not that it *couldn’t* happen from scratch, just that it’s a big time and man hour investment.

As far as embroidery, it’s much the same-it’s another big man-hour investment, and at least with that there are generally other ways for theater to fake that embroidered look, because our audience is usually at least 20 feet away. Trim is used a lot for stuff to look semi-embroidered, I’ve definitely machine-free-arm “embroidered” things before, and honestly, even puff paint or Sharpie judicially used in a big enough house will read as embroidery. In the case of a small theater, yeah, sometimes you have to do it, and that again, usually falls to the person on the team with the most previous knowledge of it. My experience with adding embroidery has been mostly “this needs to look rustic or ethnic” or “we can’t see this so we need to outline it in something.” In the theater, if you’re trying to do a Big Embroidered Game of Thrones Dress, you’ll usually find a pre-embroidered fabric, cut the motifs you want out, and re-build it as a big applique onto the dress itself, like so:

(this is beaded flower fabric with a red mesh that’s been pinned to a Big Fuckoff Red Satin Skirt by our designer and now we have a student stitcher whipstitich that all on-much faster than doing it all by hand)

The order in which you add the embroidery/beading is also dependent on what it is/where it goes too. On Big Red Skirt there, we knew that the beading was going to have to overlap seams, so we put it on last. HOWEVER, it’s a lot easier to do beading/embroidery flat, so frequently we’ll try to do as much applique or embellishment work like this as we can before putting the garment actually together. (this of course also depends on what you’re adding, because a flat faux-embroidery applique is a lot easier to feed through the machine than big beaded flowers like the ones up there. 

[costumersupportdept]

Ah yes, when fashion decides “spoiled Edwardian rich boy” will be the Next Look.

Elsie Fisher looks great in a tux, and that eye makeup is perfect.

[costumersupportdept]

Followup 2 to How Your Costume Shop Works:

WARDROBE OVERSIGHT EDITION!

AW-RIGHT kidlets, buckle up because here we go again. 

SO, in general, the costume shop gets done with making stuff in time for tech. Some places bring costumes in during first tech, some don’t, but I’m seeing more and more do one tech without so the actors can run into sets and trip over props in their normal clothes with their show shoes before they get a four-foot pannier on for Added Difficulty Level. 

Once the shop gets done, they sort of hand off costumes to the wardrobe crew. Usually this “handoff” isn’t fully done until the show opens-the shop spends tech week fixing/reinforcing/changing whatever needs done before opening, and then AND ONLY THEN do they throw their hands up and yell NOT OUR PROBLEM ANYMORE! And of course, there are always exceptions to this- sometimes things get broken beyond what the wardrobe folks can handle, so the shop will step in, sometimes you deal with a dry cleaner who bleaches AND shreds a main dress in My Fair Lady, so the shop re-builds it as fast as possible, but for the most part, it’s all now wardrobe’s problem. In the case of touring shows, this is doubly true, as you’re miles out from your shop and The Show Must Go On. 

The size of a wardrobe crew really depends on a myriad of different things-how many actors do you have, how many quick changes are there, who’s considered a “principal,” what does the laundry schedule look like, etc. For the most part on the big union touring shows, one dresser is considered able to dress three people, so on a show like Lion King, where there are around 40 people onstage and around 6 considered “principals”, I think there were 18 dressers working every night. 

As far as the hierarchy of Wardrobe Land, there’s always a Head of Wardrobe who’s the point person for the crew. They’re the ones talking with the shop and the designer as the show starts to go up, and they’re generally the ones making the paperwork for the crew. The rest of the crew is pretty much just a pool below them-the principal dressers are often a little more experienced than the ensemble dressers, but there are also ensemble tracks that take a crap-ton of presence to run too (whether it’s because of the difficulty of the track itself or the actor in it), so sometimes your more experienced people go there.

Sort of wrapped up in wardrobe, you also generally get hair and makeup. On most big union shows, they’re a separate crew, but the smaller your theater gets, the more likely it is that the wardrobe crew does a fair amount of that too. Most actors will do their own “basic” makeup and hair, but when you get into shows like Wicked or Lion King or Shrek where there’s a lot of effects stuff, you’re likely to have at least a makeup/hair supervisor who does/helps the principals and keeps an eye on what the ensemble is doing, if not a whole makeup/hair crew who does individual actors. Big Shot Opera is the hoity-toity guys in here, where EVERYONE gets their hair and makeup done by a separate crew, from the leads on down.

Stay tuned for 2.5, How Wardrobe Runs A Show

[costumersupportdept]

Followup 3 To How Your Costume Shop Works:

Your Wardrobe Crew At Work: 

SO, you’re a newbie on a wardrobe crew on a touring show/reasonably sized theater. What now?

Generally, when you walk into your first day on a wardrobe gig, they hand you a run sheet for all of the actors that you’re dressing. This is usually a breakdown of which costume they’re in for which number, when and where they change, and if it’s a quickchange. If it is a quickchange, they usually also tell you how much time you have. 

Some shows also give you a breakdown of each individual “look,” so you know what the “Temptations: Melvin” look actually is (that was a gold suit from Motown with a white frilly shirt and black patent shoes.) Others just give you a picture of it, and you do as well as you can. Often times, the actors (especially on touring shows) will know exactly what they’re supposed to be wearing and you’re just there to enable it. 

On smaller scale shows, especially if you’re moving from being a stitcher in the shop over to wardrobe as the shows go up, you’re often making your own run sheet as you go- on those shows I walk around with a notebook in my apron jotting down things like “end of "Sit Down” change Adams to green suit” Eventually, whether you’re making the run sheet sort of for yourself, or you’ve been given one, you really do memorize everything after a while-even on a show the size of Lion King, by the beginning of Week 2, I was running almost without my notecards. 

Post-show, on big shows, there’s often a separate crew that does nothing but laundry. On smaller shows, the wardrobe crew gets it done, doing all the handwashing before they leave, and cycling all the machine washables through and into the dryer. Then, when you come in the next day, the first thing you do is iron/steam everything that came out of the wash and/or got worn the last day so that people look good, and you spend your pre-show time making sure that you have everything you need in the right places for the actual run. 

[costumersupportdept]

Hello. Recently found your blog. I have a question for you: what do you think is a decent costume budget for a low budget indie feature? I was making one in 2012 when the funding fell out. I kinda looked up and YEARS had passed by and I really need to get my ass in gear and try this again. But I think the costumes were the one category i was woefully underfunded for-even if we had made it into production. Thanks!

First off, I haven’t worked film, other than a few contracted pieces, so I’m pulling from what I DO know and a series of my best guesses. 

So, first: in the academic theater that I currently work in, we generally get given anywhere from $3000-$5000 in a costume budget NOT COUNTING LABOR, AND we have a shit-ton of previously made things in storage that we can pull from. In the last academic theater that I worked in, we got usually $2000 and again, had a decent backstock of stuff to pull from. These numbers are usually for a 10-20 person show, so consider for theater we’re saying essentially that it costs at BARE MINIMUM $100 to clothe each person (and most of the time, more than that, unless you can pull/rent for free, or the show is all modern (and therefore purchased) and you have only one costume on everyone.) 

Second, you are going to have to pay costume labor as well. Even if you’re pulling/buying everything, someone needs to be in charge of what it looks like, where it’s stored, how it’s cleaned, repairs, alterations, etc. Not all of these need to be the same person (and honestly, probably SHOULDN’T be) but there needs to be someone in charge of it. If you want someone/someones competent, you are going to have to pay them, not just offer “exposure” and free craft services. When people take “exposure” jobs, not only does it lower the bar for the rest of us trying to make a living, you also have no clue what you’re getting. At this point, from what I can find in some judicious googling, in entertainment heavy areas (LA and NYC) a costume designer is going to ask for $30-$35 an hour minimum (this is also about what I charge people when I do hourly work, depending on the project/my association with them/who they work for-I will charge Big Companies more and friends less, frequently) And keep in mind that you’re not just paying them $30/hour on-set, you’re also paying them for all the prep time, the shopping time, the fitting time, etc. 

If you think you’re going to be having someone actually create parts of your costumes from scratch, budget in even more.”Cheap” fabric is usually $10-$15 a yard and goes up from there, and most clothing items will take at least three yards to make. Patterning can take upwards of four hours, cutting can take at least two, and assembly is usually 6-8 minimum. (just there, you’ve paid your $30/hour labor $360) 

On the feature film I just made something for, I was paid $200 to make a new shirt from the same pattern as the existing one in under a week, with fabric provided (and I’m betting the fabric was in the $80 range). That was one shirt that (I think) goes on the lead female, and this is a Known Big Name Actor movie. I spent about an hour on the pattern, and about 5 on constructing it, so I worked out at about $30/hour.

So essentially what I think I’m boiling this down to is that you need to figure out how much costumes mean to you and budget accordingly. If you’re okay with them being a little haphazard, by all means hire someone who will work for cheaper and Goodwill everything and you may be pleasantly surprised. If you want to make Really Sure it’s exactly what you want, start thinking $30/hour minimum in labor for however many weeks you think the shoot is, and then add $3000-$5000 on top of that for the costumes themselves. 

I could continue on into my “career” v.s. “hobby” rant to make sure you don’t hire Grandma Myrtle as a cheap option either, but my guess is that’s overkill for now.

(TL:DR Good costumes/ers cost more than people generally want to spend. Spend it anyway, because we are also people who need to pay rent and eat.)

[costumersupportdept]

So.... If someone needed to get gasoline out of clothes.. how would one do that? Theoretically.

The video obviously didn’t happen-all of my cameras decided they were too old to do what I wanted SO WE’LL TRY THAT AGAIN LATER MAYBE.

But anyway. 

They tell you not to washing machine wash clothes with gas/oil on them because ZOMG FLAMMABLE, but honestly, as long as you’re not doused in the stuff fully, you’re probably ok (aka I’ve done it numerous times and not ignited any of my washing machines.) 

I would do it with NOTHING ELSE in the washer, and I would probably do it on “warm” not hot. To get rid of the oily stain (if you have one) I’d say either douse the stain in Dawn dishwashing detergent to cut the grease, or let it sit before you put it in the wash with some cornstarch on it, to try to pull the grease out of the fibers (we use this in the shop a lot when we get machine oil from sewing machines on stuff, oops)

Stink wise, I’m gonna tell you to hit it with vodka and hang it outside for a little. 

[costumersupportdept]

Hey :) Any advice for a theatre costumer right out of college trying to get her feet under her? I just got out of a national tour and my dream is to dress princesses and superheroes! <3 Thanks!

There are about eighteen followup questions that I want to ask to make sure I’m setting you on the right track, but here’s what I’ve got: 

In perusing your blog, you seem very (for lack of a better term) pop-culture costume oriented. Which is awesome, and lots of fun, but hard to monetize. The folks that wear costumes to comicons are generally making them themselves and figuring out how to monetize their person as a “cosplay creator.” If you want to go that route, from what I’ve seen it’s a lot of personal pimping at EVERY CHANCE YOU’VE GOT. The other option on that side of the world is to try to figure out how to make cosplay costumes for nerds who have more money than sense, and that is a niche I haven’t figured out how to find yet. I know they must be out there, but I think that most of them pay the Cosplay Creator Persons to do stuff for them, because Cosplay Creator Persons aggressively pimp their own stuff all the time. (I did actually research this briefly for a while, because I’d love to do Cosplay Sewing For Money on the side, but I couldn’t figure out how you find Joe CEO who’s willing to pay you what you’re worth plus fabric for a Jedi robe unless someone happens to connect you two, and I don’t actually know people who bum around with Joe CEO on a regular basis: see broke theater artist)

Another option for princesses and superheroes is to run full tilt for Disney, because they’re making a vast majority of their in-park costumes in-house.I’ve heard mixed reviews on them as a workplace-either you have that Disney thing and you love it or it’s like having to go through Cartoon Hell every single dang doodly day. I worked for a place that contracted with Disney for about a year, and they were easily the pickiest of our clients, but they also had a fair amount of money to throw at prototype after prototype of a Cool New Thing to make sure that they worked.  I considered this one for a while, but the word on the street when I was talking to them at USITT (go to USITT, talk to interesting companies!) was that even though I had my MFA and had been working professionally as a first hand/draper/shop manager for two years, they were going to bust me down to like “costuming assistant” for $7.50/hr and make me work up their ladder to get back to being paid like a human. I also got the sense that they assume that most college educated costumers want to go into the design track, so I was a complete oddity in their eyes for wanting to be on the floor doing the actual sewing. 

The third option (and the one that I keep trying to keep an ear to the ground for chances in) is to look for film costume houses that do “specialty costumes,” or “costume fabrications” which is what they call stuff like the superhero suits from the Marvel movies and the spacesuits from The Martian. Wetaworks in NZ is obviously the powerhouse in that genre, but also the hardest to get to work for (from what I hear). There are a couple of places in CA that do the specialty stuff and I know that the Martian suits came out of a place in the UK- on that one the best thing you can do is go through the credits on movies and see where they’re crediting for something like “costume fabrication” or “suit construction” or seeing who the lead costumer is and googling them for places they’ve worked. If you go specialty costumes, however, you’re probably not doing many Big!Princess!Dresses! because they’re probably not generally as innovative as the projects the specialty houses take on. 

Hope that helped in some way-I haven’t yet broken into doing film work beyond the occasional contracted piece, and I get the sense that’s sort of where your interests are. From what I’ve seen/heard, film is all about who you know and if you’re in the right place at the right time. 

Let me know if you’ve got any more followup questions!

[costumersupportdept]

my school is doing a production of Bye Bye Birdie and we need jackets for the Birdie fan club members, we would like to use pastel colored bomber jackets, and do it as cheaply as possible, do you either have any ideas of a website where we can get cheap jackets in multiple colors, or where we could get white ones to dye? (is that a bad idea?) Thank you so much!

Well, the first thing I did was google “pastel bomber jackets” and Forever 21 seems to have a decent selection of bombers below $50. 

I would suggest NOT buying them white and dying them unless you have someone who REALLY KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING with a dye vat, because the cheaper you go, the more likely you are to have a fabric blend including polyester and poly takes some manhandling and swearing at even by a trained person to get dye to take reasonably (if it does, there are no promises-i’ve dyed things SOLID BLUE before and had the nylon thread stay BRIGHT ASS WHITE).  I could get into the dye/fiber theory here if you’re really interested, but I would AVOID DYING. 

You might also call around and see if anyone else in the region has done Birdie and would be willing to rent you the jackets-a lot of times colleges with musical theater departments or drama departments who do musicals will have almost full shows in stock, and depending on how hard it’s going to be for you guys to find these, it may be more cost effective to rent them for four weeks or something instead. If you’re renting set pieces or drops, ask if the same place has the costumes as well-I know OU is looking at renting ALL of a show from Musical Theater Wichita for next years’ season and that includes the sets/drops/costumes as a unit. 

Otherwise, I’d hit the “musical theater costume rentals” search in Google and start down the line. I think in the long run if you can’t find them in the colors you want at a price that you can buy them at, it’s going to be easier to look at a rental.