Costume Designer

What they do

Costume designers break the script down by character and story day, then decide for every garment whether it is made, hired from a costume house, bought and altered, or built from a combination. They research the period, the technology and the social detail, produce mood boards and often illustrations, and get looks signed off by the director and producer. Fittings are the centre of the schedule: every look photographed, every detail logged on a fittings sheet. The Costume Designers Guild notes that costumes are usually made in multiples, so a garment can look identical across weeks of shooting or deteriorate exactly as the story requires, with additional versions for stunt performers and stand-ins. Designers work with the production designer and hair and make-up designer so palette and period agree, and with the camera department on tests, because a fabric that flares or misbehaves on a sensor has to be found before principal photography. They recruit and schedule a team that can run to an assistant costume designer, illustrator, supervisor, cutter-fitters, dyers, milliners and makers, and manage a budget of purchases, hires and labour. On set they appear for new cast and new looks while the costume supervisor holds day-to-day continuity, washing and repair. The Guild describes the work as closer to sociology than to fashion: reading a character and answering, in clothing, how that person wants to be seen.

What they decide

The calls that belong to this role and no other.

• What each character wears in each scene, subject to director and producer sign-off
• Make, hire, buy or alter, garment by garment
• The costume palette, and how it sits against the sets and against hair and make-up
• How many multiples of a costume exist, and what state of distress each is in
• Which fabrics survive the show's light and camera, tested rather than assumed
• Who is hired into the department, and how the fitting schedule is built

Principles of the craft

• Clothes answer 'who is this' before the dialogue does: the Costume Designers Guild frames the job as revealing era, status, emotional state and, most tellingly, how a character wants to be perceived. Design the self-presentation, not the designer's own taste.
• Contemporary is a design problem, not a shopping trip: the Guild names the belief that present-day shows are simply shopped as a misconception, since bought pieces still need fitting, customising and combining. A character who buys their own clothes has made choices, and those choices have to be designed for them.
• Design in multiples and in states: the same garment may need to exist clean, wet, torn and burnt, in several copies, plus versions for stunt doubles and stand-ins. Deciding the states early is what makes continuity affordable rather than heroic.
• The fitting is where performance starts: actors routinely report becoming the character in the fitting room, changing posture and carriage as the clothes go on. Treat it as a rehearsal and write down what happened, because that discovery is design information.
• Test on camera under the show's light: colour, sheen, weave and the separation of one black from another all behave differently under a tungsten key and a daylight source, and a fabric that vibrates on a sensor becomes a six-week problem.

Common mistakes

• Designing to a still image rather than to movement; a garment that photographs well and moves badly is a bad costume
• Building a palette without the production designer, then fighting the walls for the whole shoot
• One hero costume and no multiples, so a rain scene ends the shooting day
• The experienced version: a historically immaculate design that flattens the character, because accuracy replaced the question of what this person chose to put on this morning
• Fittings that are not photographed and noted, leaving the supervisor to invent the continuity later
• Locking looks before a camera test under the lighting the show will actually use

How to learn it

Exercises and routes in, not a reading list.

• Dress one actor three ways for the same scene, as somebody who wants to be liked, somebody who wants to be left alone, and somebody who did not think about it, using only borrowed clothes. Shoot the identical frame each time and ask people who have not read the scene who each person is.
• Break a produced screenplay into story days and costume changes, count the garments and the multiples you would need, and compare that number with the number of shooting days.
• Take one shirt and distress it in five stages, photographing each. You now know what your own hand does to fabric and how long it takes to do it twice the same way.
• Photograph three fabrics under a tungsten lamp, a daylight LED and a window. Note which colours shift and which weaves misbehave on the sensor.
• Sit in on a fitting if you can get access, and write down every note the designer makes that is about behaviour rather than about fit.