Year 7 - costume design!

Year 7 - costume design!

Today you will be learning about some iconic costumes from famous theatre productions.

You will get to pick your favourite show and design your own character and costume or design a costume for an existing character.

There will be some slides introducing shows so you can pick one of those if you havent seen any yet!

What does a costume designer do and why are they important?

Costume designers are in charge of the look and creation of costumes and outfits used in television, film and theatre productions.

Costumes can tell us a lot about what time period a character is in, perhaps what country the play is set in and can also reveal more information about the character itself!

Costume designers are creative with an excellent eye for detail as they are used to working with many different fabrics and colours!

Iconic costumes from theatre productions!

The next few slides will include some information of some famous theatre productions.

Hopefully these will inspire you to create your own costumes for these productions or even come up with your own idea for a character and costume!

Aladdin the musical!

The Genie in Aladdin is a very confident, loud and bubbly character, therefore his costume is very bright and glittery to reflect his personality.

Anyone who has seen the film version will know that the Genie is blue! The musical has taken inspiration from this by using blue fabrics!

We know that the set for this story is in the city of Agrabar, a make belief land set in the Middle East. The costume designer took inspiration from clothing worn in countries such as Turkey, India, Egypt and Morocco.

Poll

What would you rate this costume out of 5? ( 1 being lowest - 5 being highest)

• 1

• 2

• 3

• 4

• 5

The Lion King

The Lion King is the story of a young lion’s journey from childhood to adulthood, set in the vast landscape of the African savannah.

In the photo above we see the characters Mufasa, Rafiki the baboon and Sarafi.

The production is based around Kenya and Tanzania. There are no real animals in this show however the performers need to communicate the essence of each animal, without trying to imitate them. Therefore they use props to help create many of the animals, as we can see with the lion masks.

They have used traditional garments often worn by tribes in Kenya and surrounding areas such as the Swahili tribe. If you google this tribe you can see the inspiration for many of the characters clothing.

Poll

What would you rate this costume out of 5? ( 1 being lowest - 5 being highest)

• 1

• 2

• 3

• 4

• 5

Cats the musical

As you can tell by the title this production is all about Cats. The performers in this musical act like cats, sing, dance and even do acrobatics!

It was really important that these costumes were designed to help the performers move. The performers wore costumes that were made from leotard material which is very stretchy.

The costumes include furry ears, a tail and frizzy hair! This was all designed to make the performers look more animalistic.

Poll

What would you rate this costume out of 5? ( 1 being lowest - 5 being highest)

• 1

• 2

• 3

• 4

• 5

Wicked

The two people in this photo are Elphaba The Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch.

Their costumes represent the opposite of each other, good vs evil. Glinda's costume is light in colour, sparkly and she wears a crown. She looks more like a princess than she does a witch.

Elphaba however has green skin painted on her, she wears a black dress and a witch's hat. This makes her look more like a stereotypical witch.

Poll

Which costume design was your favourite?

• Wicked

• Cats

• The Lion King

• Aladdin

• Other