The Costume Designer’s Toolkit: The Process of Creating Effective Design

The Costume Designer’s Toolkit explores the wide-ranging skills required to design costumes for live performance in theatre, dance, opera, and themed entertainment. Arranged in chronological order to create a design, each chapter describes tools, strategies, and techniques costume designers use to create lively and believable characters within a story environment. The book provides a step-by-step outline of the costume design process beginning with developing as an artist and creating an artistic vision for a script. It covers a wide range of topics, including:

• Assessing the scope of a production
• Understanding design thinking and the creative process
• Project management and budget forecasting
• Collaborating with and leading creative teams
• Current practices in costume rendering and communication
• Mixing purchased, rented, stock, and built costumes to form a design
• Designing a garment with impact
• Fitting costumes on performers
• Combining grit and grace for a successful career

Each topic includes case studies and tips from experienced professionals, identifies vital skills, describes techniques, and reveals the essential elements of artistic leadership, collaboration, and cultural acumen.

The Costume Designer’s Toolkit is the perfect guidebook for the student, aspiring, or early-career costume designer, to be used alone or in costume design university courses.

Holly Poe Durbin is an award-winning costume designer for theatre, opera, independent film, and themed entertainment. She has collaborated with notable actors such as Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, William Shatner, Martin Short, and Tessa Thompson to create engaging characters. She has worked internationally, on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in regional theatres around the US including the South Coast Repertory, the Old Globe Theatres, Mark Taper Forum, St Louis Repertory, Cincinnati Playhouse, Portland Center Stage, Shakespeare Center LA, and Playmakers Repertory in North Carolina. She was the Costume Director for the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles and is the Head of Costume Design studies at the University of California Irvine.