Costume

The course seeks to present you with demanding but exciting and valuable projects that will demonstrate the breadth of the costume making and costume supervision subject areas and the focus that you will need to achieve to succeed in a competitive employment market. Graduates from this course have gone on to make costumes for theatres and film studios all over the world, so if this is your dream we can help you achieve it.

You’ll discover how to create historically inspired, sometimes fantastical or contemporary costumes on this exciting and creative course. You will make costumes and supervise for shows, films, plays and new performance disciplines.

This is a diverse and demanding subject – you need to be interested in art, design and all types of performance. As well as technical skill, you’ll realise great costume making and supervision of the process depends on your ability to interpret ideas and we place a real emphasis on how you approach your conceptual work. You will work very closely alongside students from the performance design and film costume course as well as with our make-up, acting and film production courses on theatre and film productions. We believe that understanding and experiencing the overall production process is what sets our students apart and gives them an edge in industry.

Course Content:

In the first year, the course curriculum explores fundamental costume making skills for performance costume. You will learn to place your practice in a wider social and cultural context, working with a designer to realise costumes that support the portrayal of character. Costume supervision is delivered across the three years with the option to specialise in level 6. This role can be described as the management of costume where students procure and source costume for productions or manage a team of makers. This places you at the heart of live productions and leads to employment in wardrobe departments in Theatre, Film and TV. You also develop skills throughout the first year in theoretical study. Here the focus is on learning as much as you can about performance studies and methods for applying critical theory to your written work.

In the second year, you will learn advanced historical costume making, tailoring and create a conceptual, experimental costume. Most of our students undertake a work placement in the summer after Year 2 and this is also encouraged in the third year. In the dynamic third year you will have the opportunity to work on an extensive and valuable range of live theatre and film productions, collaborating with other BA courses and external partners. In addition, you will continue to develop your research, analysis and critical argument skills through tasks designed to place your practice in context.

Studios and resources:

Each studio space has enough industry standard cutting tables for students to work on. Students also have access to: industrial sewing machines and over lockers, industrial steam presses, professional mannequins, CAD driven embroidery machines and a dye a room, where you can use dyeing and screen-printing equipment. You will also learn the art of breaking down (the ageing of costume) to support characterisation.

The course benefits from two Costumes Stores, which provide on-campus hire house facilities for live work in theatre and film. The course also has its own Costume Archive that includes hundreds of examples of extant garments and related objects. These garments are fundamental to understanding the cut, construction, fabric and decoration of costume and are used extensively in teaching and learning.