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If you're a draper, you already know your cape yokes from your soutache. The rest of us could use some explanation.
A draper, for those of us who don't work in the theater, is a costume maker — someone who turns a costume designer's sketch into a garment to be worn by an actor. To be a good draper, you have to know how to recreate clothing from any given historical period — anything from the trousers worn by Willy Lomax in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman to the cape worn by Rosencrantz in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Good drapers have done their jobs when their costumes are convincing enough that the audience doesn't notice. Use the wrong soutache — that's a narrow braid with a herringbone pattern used to trim a garment — and your costume may draw attention to itself.
Draper or not, you might like to know about the Costar Vintage Clothing Archive, a web site created by the costume students in the Department of Dramatic Art. Costar is a growing catalog of the costumes and clothing of historical interest that have been donated to the Department of Dramatic Art and the PlayMakers Repertory Company. While Costar is intended primarily for costume makers and historians, scene painters may find the site useful. More generally, anyone doing research to date a particular garment might find some clues using Costar.
So far, Costar features about 50 catalogued garments. In addition to photographs (both thumbnail and high-resolution versions), Costar includes a detailed description of every part of each garment: "Center front is shaped with one dart that has been trimmed to 3/8 (of an inch)." Costar also notes any damage the garments have sustained: "There are moth holes in the wool and the painting has worn off the buttons." Also offered, when available, are patterns based on the original garment.
Judy Adamson is leading the effort to organize and document the department's collection. Bobbi Owen, who specializes in costume history, determines the age of the garments and helps determine their original purpose. Graduate students such as Jade Bettin work on cataloging the garments, while work-study undergraduates remove the garments from their boxes, steam them and photograph them for the web site.
To minimize further damage, Adamson says, the researchers handle the garments as little as possible. After the garments are catalogued, they're wrapped in acid-free tissue and boxed. The exterior of each box then gets a photo of its contents, so the researchers can tell what's inside without disturbing the garments.
"It's not a museum-quality collection," Adamson says, "but it is a resource for study of historical clothing that we can share with others."
Judy Adamson is costume director in the Department of Dramatic Art. Bobbi Owen is senior associate dean for Undergraduate Education and professor of dramatic art. Owen received a University Research Council Grant to help hire students to work on Costar. Find Costar online at drama.unc.edu/costar.
Provided by Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle
Writer: Jason Smith
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