Kaye Voyce (costume designer for True West) describes the art of costume design, in collaboration with the director, actors and other designers, as a kind of “active collage process.” “With more contemporary clothes, it’s all about hunting down the right pieces, being open to surprise and how things are put together,” she says.
I love the idea of costume design as collage. It’s helpful to think of it that way when you are designing a modern dress play where you will be finding most of the costumes rather than making them. At Collin College I designed the costumes for a play Rust by Austin Bunn. It is a collage type of play because it’s based on interviews with real people who were displaced when a GM plant closed in Michigan. It would be very topical now. But it had just regular and distressed clothing, not high fashioned or even particularly interesting. I like working on plays like that because it’s all about character and making the actors feel right and good. I started by creating the collage above and the developed the costumes with the actors from things I found and things I bought in thrift stores.
Costumier 