PART Dressing for the

WRITTEN BY TESSA PAUL DESIGNED BY ESTHER LIM

Wirtz costume designers provide insight into their creative passion.

Awhite dress with ruffles accented with blue lace and ribbons. At first glance, it is a beautiful, feminine dress from the early 20th century. Upon further inspection, one can see the blue lace detailing at the top forms a Star of David around the neck. The neckline rises high up toward the chin, circling tightly around the throat.

Rifkele is the character who wears this dress in Indecent, the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center of Performing Arts’s spring production. Her religiously conservative parents exalt strict control over her, and

The designers

Wallfish has always had a love for design. She went to an arts high school where she could pursue her passion for fashion. It wasn’t until her internship at the Metropolitan Opera, her first experience working with costumes on a large scale, that her interest shifted to costume design.

“That was really my first time I realized how costume design relates to the storytelling and how it can affect the whole production,” Wallfish says.

She decided to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in theater with a concentration in costume design at the University of California, Los Angeles.

MFA graduate student Alaina Moore had a similar journey into costume design. She was a general art and design student at Columbia College Chicago and focused on fashion for a while. She eventually found her way into a theater environment and quickly fell in love with costume design.

“I love being kind of limited in a way by a specific story,” Moore says. “It reigns in what can be a chaotic curiosity that I have about the world.” the lace Star of David around her neck mimics the constrictive environment she lives in. The dress appears to be choking her, representative of how the forces of her family and religion restrict her freedom of who she wants to love.

Costume designers are an integral part of the theater production team, and their work requires not only artistic skill but also creative vision and analytical thinking. The in-depth analysis of how Rifkele’s costume conveys Indecent’s themes is just a fraction of the work Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate student Lia Wallfish, the production’s costume designer, puts in when designing costumes for theater productions. turned into a professional career for over six years.

Other costume designers at Wirtz were drawn to the field as an extracurricular but pursued other academic interests during their undergraduate years.

MFA graduate student Ben Kress majored in psychology at Kenyon College. During his junior year, he took a costume design class for fun. He fell in love with it and began working on student productions, using work-study hours to spend time in the costume shop.

Wirtz puts on multiple shows every year, and the costume designers play a critical part in the final performances. The costume shop located inside Wirtz is a safe haven for the designers. Bobbins of thread stacked on a rack, various hats strewn across a table, mannequins scattered across the room; this seemingly hectic space is where creativity thrives.

Storytelling through costumes

Storytelling is an essential component of every show and is also integral to the costume designer’s creative process. Costume designers help bring characters to life and directors’ visions to fruition.

Wallfish briefly worked in the costume departments of television series like American Horror Story and American Crime Story , but she says the creative freedom and storytelling of theater produce a more enticing expression of artistry.

“It felt in line with why I was interested in psychology, too, because it’s really just exploring why we are who we are and who we can be but through art,” Kress says.

Eventually, this extracurricular passion became a post-graduation internship at a theater in Baltimore, Maryland, which

Moore agrees the storytelling and collaborative aspect drew her away from fashion and into costume design.

“It’s such an ecosystem, a sort of system of storytelling, and I really love that about it,” Moore says. “I love that the collaborative aspect of theater gets me out of my own head and my own creative imagination and makes it this whole community coming together to tell a story.”

Kress values storytelling and its effects on the characters he’s working on. He recognizes that clothes are often the first thing a person sees about a character, and audiences can form many impressions about a character at first glance.

“I’ve been thinking about my art as a kind of a conversation in that way,” Kress says. “When this character shows up on stage, you’re thinking about, ‘What is the first thing you want the audience to hear?’”

During Fall Quarter, Kress was the costume designer for the Wirtz production Me… Jane, a show about Jane Goodall, the famous anthropologist who worked closely with chimpanzees. He connected with the production because he could follow her real-life journey of connecting with nature and becoming an environmental activist. Kress explored themes of sustainability to guide his designs for the show; most of the clothes were thrifted, and a prop chicken was made entirely out of discarded denim.