La Discreta Enamorada in Production at SMU

You are what You Wear: Fashion, Clothing, and Costume

– by Brittany Janiece Foster (B.F.A., '09)

The clothes we wear mean something to us as well as to the people who see us. Clothing changes the way we move and feel. How different do your feet feel when you wear high heels or tennis shoes? Flip flops or lace-up boots? How different do you feel in your favorite flannel pajama pants and worn t-shirt rather than a tuxedo?

Fashion helps us to define our individual self. It also aids us in presenting a certain kind of persona to the outside world. The clothes we wear every day are different from haute couture fashion and from theatrical costumes. While high fashion and costumes help the wearer project a certain image, the reasons we choose any of the three are very specific. The clothes we wear every day must be practical: they cover our body for warmth, modesty, and purpose. Self-expression is a by-product, often welcome but not necessary. Models wear a particular designer’s fashions to demonstrate his or her creative talent. They may wear a designer’s less comfortable garment only long enough to walk down the runway and back or in a photography session, but students going to school or business people, teachers, or construction workers likely want to dress in clothes they can wear all day and multiple times that are suited to the tasks of their lives. These people will not want to worry, for example, about ultra-wrinkly fabrics creasing every time they take a step or sit down during the day. Fashions, especially in haute couture, must be bigger and brighter than life, because designers want to make an artistic or aesthetic statement. In the same way, every day clothes would not be appropriate for the fashion runway, because most of us wear jeans to school or suits to work, neither of which makes much of a bold aesthetic statement—but which are comfortable and useful and express our personalities.

Costumes on the stage bridge the gap between the fashions on the runway and everyday clothing. If everyday clothing reflects our self-expression, then costume design reflects the creative expression of the combination of the designer and the production. Actors, like models and unlike the rest of us, usually don’t get to choose what they wear or have a say in the design, beyond expressing difficulties in movement, breathing, or fit. Costumes, like fashion, seek to make a statement; costumes express the production and the play, while fashion expresses the creativity of the individual designer.

On the stage, it is usually necessary that the costumes be interesting to look at; however, actors have different physical and aesthetic demands than fashion models. Models need to be able to walk up and down the catwalk for a minute or two and make the haute couture fashion displayed (and thus the designer) look good, actors may need to be onstage for up to two or three hours, speaking and moving the entire time. The actor must be able to breathe comfortably, so that he or she can project the dialogue. Actors must be able to walk around the space, or crawl, dance, do jumping jacks, fight with a sword, or any number of other physical activities, so costumes must not hinder an actor’s movement.

The costume designer’s role in designing the clothing for a play is different from that of a fashion designer. A fashion designer considers only his or her ideas or, if making a gown for a specific customer, what that patron wants. Generally, the designer’s line will be reproduced by manufacturers using his or her original ideas. On the other hand, a costume designer will design each costume in a production as a one-time only outfit, worn by a specific character and tailored to a specific actor’s body. The costume designer cannot simply put costumes on the stage because they are pretty or well-made or came from his or her ideas about clothes. The costume designer must analyze the playwright’s script in order to know the characters.

Costumes serve several specific purposes in the theatre beyond allowing the audience to identify each individual actor-character onstage. Such factors as the character’s gender, age, and social status (old queen versus pageboy, for example) play into the design. The designer must also take into account a character’s personality: is he or she extroverted or introverted, honest or deceitful, intelligent or stupid, conformist or freethinking: a rock star versus a librarian. Characters’ differences should manifest in what they wear onstage so that the audience can see the difference.

Compare two characters from La Discreta Enamorada. In the first scene Belisa, a middle-aged widow, is clad in a simple, modest black dress that covers her from neck to toe, while Gerarda, a high-class escort, wears a fine, black lace dress with a nude underlay that hugs her body only to the knee. What do their costumes say about these characters? Belisa is old-fashioned, conservative, or modest; further, she does not spend money on frivolities like fancy clothing. Gerarda is rich enough to purchase fancy dresses and is less concerned with being “proper”: the silhouette and material of her dress are meant to attract the eye and to reveal her body’s shape. How do costumes give an indication of age? The lines of the costumes might help indicate a character’s age to the audience. Most of Belisa’s clothing probably include floor-length skirts and thus restrict the actress’s movement—suggesting middle-age—while the clothes of Fenisa, her daughter, will have skirts that come to mid-calf and move more freely, which will convey her youth and vivacity.

Costumes also give clues to the audience about time period in which the play’s production takes place. For example: a character clothed in a doublet and hose is probably not found in a play set in 1956, just as a character in jeans and a leather jacket is probably not in a play about 1776: if these costumes did appear in these time periods, there would be a good explanation for them. The designer must be especially thoughtful while creating costumes for same-aged actors, because two actors who play a father and son can be the same age, especially in college productions.

It is obvious that costumes are as important to the actors as they are to the audience. Just as our own clothes change us when we change roles in life, stage clothes can change a character. Many times, actors will say that their character comes to life when they get into their costumes. It can make a huge different to an actress if she rehearses barefoot and then puts on stilettos, or in her own jeans and t-shirt but dons a corset for performances. Costumes are not just made up of clothes like shirts, pants, and dresses, but include shoes, hats, wigs, masks, makeup, and accessories such as glasses, jewelry, fans, handkerchiefs, handbags, pocket watches, and scarves. All these items are things an actor can use to help create the character and are usually selected for the actor by the costume designer. An actor might discover that when he puts on his character’s glasses, the character tries to hide behind them or when he puts on a pair of boots, the character may use the loud sound they make to command attention.

The costume design must also collaborate with other creative artists of the production. The costume designer, the light designer, and the set designer must all meet with the director to interpret the play and to form one vision of their particular production of the play. The costume designs must fit in with the design of the rest of the show. Together, they must all create one coherent picture, based primarily on the playwright’s text and the director’s vision. It would be inappropriate to have all the characters wearing silk gowns in a play that takes place in a prison. If the designers never met to discuss the overall design, the production would be a disaster because all the components must work together and contribute to the whole. For example, costumers and lighting designers must work together because when different colors of light hit certain colors of fabric, the lights can change the color of the fabric; the lighting can change the reflective quality or wash out a color. If a costume designer creates a lovely green gown, a lighting designer could not put a red light on it or it would look a muddy brownish color, and all the work the costumer carefully put into that dress would be wasted. The same is true if there are several characters onstage wearing several different bright colors. The costumer and lighting designer must ensure that all the colors can work together to create a coherent picture onstage.

Claudia Stephens is the costume designer for La Discreta Enamorada and an associate professor in the Division of Theatre at SMU. For this production of Lope de Vega’s play, she has based her designs on those of the 20th-century Spanish fashion designer, Cristobal Balenciaga: this is because the SMU production of La Discreta Enamorada is set in Spain during the 1950s, but in the late 16th-century when de Vega wrote it. Balenciaga designed many gowns with interesting shapes, like layers of puffy balloon skirts and voluminous sleeves shaped like Chinese lanterns, made of expensive fabrics like black silks. How does Stephens use Balenciaga’s designs to create costumes for the show? She kept the architectural shapes used by the designer as the foundation for her costumes. The costumes in this production will still have the visually stimulating silhouettes but will be modified so that the actors can still dance and move freely about the stage without bulky sleeves or skirts getting in their way. Additionally, the costumes must be constructed with a budget in mind; a college production will not support using the same expensive materials Balenciaga used.

Fashion, everyday clothing, and costume each demonstrate creative expression. Without them, life would be bland. The next time you are watching a play or a movie, think about how the costumes you see inform you about the characters. The next time you see a photograph of a model in haute couture fashion, think about what that designer is telling us about her or his artistic vision. The next time you choose clothing for school or work, consider the messages you are sending by the silhouette, fabric, fit, and color of your clothing: it does a lot more than just keep you warm.