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The foundation of Tailoring for the Visual Learner is the exploration of new and creative approaches to preserve, promote, and pass on the art of individually handcrafted menswear for theatre and film. This project culminated in the creation of an instructional video guide unlike anything currently available on the market. Using high definition cameras and a team of highly skilled professionals, I produced, wrote, directed and hosted an instructional video that takes the viewer through every step of the creation of a hand tailored vest: from fabric preparation and drafting to the final fitting. Instruction utilizes a modern voice aimed at early career sewing professionals who wish to advance, and seek an alternative to confusing drafting books or incomplete online tutorials that avoid the features of a truly well constructed garment. By combining up close camera work with textual explanations, graphics, and verbal explanations, I have created a new approach to tailoring instruction aimed at visual learners, who make up a large majority of costuming professionals. By taking the viewer through the tailoring process up close and step-by-step, the time-honored tradition of tailoring is now available and affordable to countless artisans who seek to advance and/or teach their craft. / text

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1978 A95 / Master of Science

Sunyata: Transfigurations in Silk was a live-process art event featuring silk painting, costume creation and dance. The event took place in the B. Iden Payne Theatre Lobby on the University of Texas at Austin campus over the course of a week, during which I endeavored to paint 560 square feet of white silk suspended in the space. The images I painted formed a personal creation narrative, inspired by the lived experience creating and archetypical themes from creation mythology, cosmogony and human development. Throughout the event, a steady stream of visitors passed through the installation, contributing inspiration to the process in the form of images, ideas, quotes and stories, and witnessed the active creating unfold over time. On the seventh day of the event, upon the completion of the painting process, the silk was cut into pieces and transformed into costumes on live dancer’s bodies. Inspired by ritual wall painting and sand painting from Indian, Tibetan and Navaho cultures and the temporally bound work of contemporary action-based artists, the project was an assay into the transitory nature of the artistic process and an exploration of transformative properties of silk (a material that is central to my work as textile artist and costume designer). The event also explores how a personal creative process can become public, performative and participatory. / text

How does the act of drawing enable the costume designer to design costumes that work effectively with the physicality of the performing body? This research is located in the field of scenography and refers specifically to costume design practices within this field. The research project developed from a growing visibility of performances developed and created primarily from the physicality of the body rather than from a text. In these performance environments, where there is no initial text to work from and sound, lighting and set have yet to be developed the costume designer must predominantly respond to the physicality of the performing body. However, if the costume designer is to ensure that their designs and costumes work effectively with the ideas developed by the performer they must also address the relationship between their interpretation of the performing body and the intentions of the performer. My research responds to limited resources that examine and document how a costume designer can address this relationship and create designs that work with the physicality of the performing body rather than designs that work with a text. As a result of the limited resources in this area of costume design I refer to an additional field for reference. Using training practices based in figure skating to structure my drawing process my research provides new insight into how a costume designer can create costume designs that work with and enhance the physicality of the performing body. By using this repetitive drawing process to both interpret the performing body and initiate a dialogue with the performer my research enhances collaborative practices in costume design and within the field of scenography. In the absence of relevant literature in figure skating, the drawing and redrawing approach I use is primarily examined and supported using a combination of performance and training approaches developed by Jacques Lecoq. These approaches address and explore how performance is created through an awareness of the physicality of the body in relation to the physicality of mark making, and through a repetitive training structure similar to that used in figure skating. Drawing is used as the primary research method, applied within a methodology based on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy. This methodological approach both facilitates the costume designer's encounter with the physicality of the performing body and enables an examination of this encounter in order to understand how the designer interprets and makes sense of this body. These encounters are structured through and conducted within three ethnographic case studies based in theatre performance, costume design and figure skating. The research case studies are contextualised using interviews, diaries and background research and are analysed using a structure that draws on Corbin and Strauss's Grounded Theory. The research concludes by outlining three main stages through which the process of drawing and re-drawing is applied and used to create costume designs that work effectively with the physicality of the performing body. In describing and explaining these three stages I outline how the repetitive drawing process integrates within a performance process and as a result becomes a vehicle for collaboration between the costume designer and the performer.

This thesis showcases the work of four costume designers working within the genre of costume drama during the 1950s in France, namely Georges Annenkov, Rosine Delamare, Marcel Escoffier, and Antoine Mayo. In unstitching the cinematic wardrobes of these four designers, the ideological impact of the costumes that underpin this prolific yet undervalued genre are explored. Each designer’s costume is undressed through the identification of and subsequent methodological focus on their signature garment and/or design trademark. Thus the sartorial and cinematic significance of the corset, the crinoline, and accessories, is explored in order to determine an ideological pattern (based in each costumier’s individual design methodology) from which the fabric of this thesis may then be cut. In so doing, the way in which film costume speaks as an independent producer of cinematic meaning may then be uncovered. By viewing costume design as an autonomous ideological system, rather than a part of mise-en-scène subordinate to narrative, this fabric-centric enquiry consolidates Stella Bruzzi’s insightful exploration of film costume in Undressing Cinema, Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997). Where this study diverges from previous work, however, is in its focus on specific costume designers to illustrate the way in which the costume of costume drama may operate as a complex component of cinematic signification in terms of gender, authenticity, status and power.

In this thesis, I intend to present an original costume design for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. This production is the first full collaboration of its kind between Virginia Commonwealth University’s Theatre Department and Barksdale Theatre. This thesis will be a complete account of my entire design process from the design concept to the finished, realized production. I will be examining my design choices and finished production photos, including color photographs of my original renderings, fabric swatches and research. Throughout my thesis, I will be researching ways to accurately represent the millions of exploited itinerant farm laborers who survived the severe drought and economic depression of the early 1930s.

The purpose of this thesis is to explain my process in the development of the costume design for Urinetown: The Musical as my last mainstage design project for the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Theatre. Included is the concept, analysis and design process that went into creating effective costumes for the production for the stage.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

This thesis considers fashion and cinema as crucial embodiments of Yugoslavian culture. As such, it gives a shine to the potential inherent in film costume for the historical analysis of Yugoslavian national identity and its politics. The focus is on the semiotic analysis of costume design in two native films by Emir Kusturica: When Father Was Away on Business and Underground. Social relations are investigated through the lens of a critical theory, with particular interest in questions of gender, violence, and sexuality. Taking the idea from a critical theory - that power constitutes all human relations - this thesis considers dress as a core symbol for performing power in Yugoslavian society.