One of the interesting things about fitting period garments is using corsets. Let me tell you right now that you are not going to pull your actors waists in to 19” like in Gone With The Wind. What a corset will do is change the shape of the waist from an oval into a circle. That will make your actors waist seem smaller from the front but unfortunately bigger from the sides but that can be disguised with your brilliant designs. It’s disappointing that you won’t be making the waists any smaller. But Victorians wore corsets from when they were children. Their bodies were different. Indeed it seems to me that bodies from the 1950’s were different than ours are today. I don’t know why it is but waist seem to have disappeared completely. It’s funny that actors today think that their waists are near their hip bones. Clothes that fit at the natural waist look odd to them. Also it seems to me that there are more actors who have skinny fit legs yet still have a muffin top. I think it’s from jogging.
A corset can reshape fat a little bit by pushing it up and down and making the actual waist smaller. But all that a corset will do for a very thin actor is add bulk. That is sad really but true. So don’t make the mistake of trying to pull in the corset on a thin actor because you will very likely bruise their ribs. Ouch!
Another challenge for fitting period garments is the armhole and how to make a period looking sleeve work for a modern body and often non period movements. For example in Victorian times women didn’t raise their arms above their heads apparently. But you know that a modern actor will want to. So how do you alter the sleeve to make that work? It’s counter intuitive but a tighter arm hole will allow for more movement. It seems like if you made the arm hole and the sleeve loose it would be easier to move but you can have a tight fitting sleeve if it is cut right. One time I was trying to talk the actor playing Marmee in “Little Women” that the sleeve on her dress was period appropriate and would work. I asked her why she needed to raise her arms and she said to hug my daughters. Enough said, I changed the sleeve!
It is very tempting to try to use real period garments for shows. They are so beautiful and the fabrics are often much nicer than anything made today. But most of the time they are so fragile that one show will finish them. It is best to try to reproduce them in modern, washable or cleanable fabrics and use the originals in your shop as teaching tools. It’s great to have some real period garments to show students how things were made. When I’ve done that we also marveled at how small people used to be.
When I worked as a stitcher at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1980 they did complete muslin mockups of all the costumes. They were amazingly beautiful just on their own and I think led to a fashion for all white costume designs. After they were fitted they would be completely taken apart and used as patterns and flat lining. They washed and ironed (mangled) all the muslin that was used for the mockups so that it could be used as flat lining without shrinking later. One of my first tasks there every morning was to operate the mangle. It took two of us to hold the damp washed muslin flat and feed it into the mangle. There was a smell to it that I’ll never forget, not a bad smell just very evocative of that time in my life. For years after leaving there I fitted muslins and then flat lined everything. Then it finally occurred to me that flat lining everything is great when the costumes are going to be used 500 times in a long season that lasts for months. But for a college production that will only run for 12 nights it might be overkill and a waste of time. Live and learn.
Costumier 