Costumes Blog

An Indian costume is a fun and easy costume to make in a hurry and wear for Halloween, school plays, or any other reason. You can use kid-sized scrubs to make dress-up play clothes for your children, as well. Here are the instructions on how to make an Indian costumes from scrubs.

Purchase or use existing scrubs that you own. Brown scrubs are preferable.

A fashion week is a fashion industry event, lasting approximately one week, that allows fashion designers or “houses” to display their latest collections. Runway shows are typically the highlight of fashion week. The most prominent fashion weeks are held in the fashion capitals of Paris, London, New York and Milan.[1] In the early and mid 2000s, fashion weeks sprang up around the globe to draw attention to designers elsewhere.[1]

In the major fashion capitals, fashion weeks are semiannual events. “Fall” fashion weeks, showcasing designers’ fall collections, are held January through March, and “spring” fashion weeks, showcasing spring collections, are held September through November. Fashion weeks must be held several months in advance of the season to allow the press and buyers a chance to preview fashion designs for the following season. This is also to allow time for retailers to arrange to purchase or incorporate the designers into their retail marketing.

Fashion weeks are attended by buyers for major stores, the media, celebrities, and members of the entertainment industry. In years past, fashion weeks were predominantly for “the trade only”; however, today they are entertainment and media events. They may incorporate live musicians, celebrity guests, lavish galas and charity events, and a few allow the public to purchase special passes to see the runway shows or attend expositions which display handbags, jewelery, shoes, hats and cosmetics. Many important fashion design schools participate in the shows, as well.

Some fashion weeks can be genre-specific, such as a Miami Fashion Week (Swimwear), Pr�t-a-Porter (ready-to-wear) Fashion Week, Couture (one-of-a-kind designer original) Fashion Week, Palm Springs Fashion Week (Resort Collections) and Bridal Fashion Week.

Though colors and patterns of textiles changed from year to year,[8] the cut of a gentleman’s coat and the length of his waistcoat, or the pattern to which a lady’s dress was cut changed more slowly. Men’s fashions largely derived from military models, and changes in a European male silhouette are galvanized in theatres of European war, where gentleman officers had opportunities to make notes of foreign styles: an example is the “Steinkirk” cravat or necktie.

The pace of change picked up in the 1780s with the increased publication of French engravings that showed the latest Paris styles; though there had been distribution of dressed dolls from France as patterns since the sixteenth century, and Abraham Bosse had produced engravings of fashion from the 1620s. By 1800, all Western Europeans were dressing alike (or thought they were): local variation became first a sign of provincial culture, and then a badge of the conservative peasant [9].

Although tailors and dressmakers were no doubt responsible for many innovations before, and the textile industry certainly led many trends, the History of fashion design is normally taken to date from 1858, when the English-born Charles Frederick Worth opened the first true haute couture house in Paris. Since then the professional designer has become a progressively more dominant figure, despite the origins of many fashions in street fashion.

Fashion in clothes has allowed wearers to express emotion or solidarity with other people for millennia. Modern Westerners have a wide choice available in the selection of their clothes. What a person chooses to wear can reflect that person’s personality or likes. When people who have cultural status start to wear new or different clothes a fashion trend may start. People who like or respect them may start to wear clothes of a similar style.

Fashions may vary significantly within a society according to age, social class, generation, occupation and geography as well as over time. If, for example, an older person dresses according to the fashion of young people, he or she may look ridiculous in the eyes of both young and older people. The terms “fashionista” or “fashion victim” refer to someone who slavishly follows the current fashions (implementations of fashion).

One can regard the system of sporting various fashions as a fashion language incorporating various fashion statements using a grammar of fashion. (Compare some of the work of Roland Barthes.)

The habit of continually changing the style of clothing worn, which is now worldwide, at least among urban populations, is a distinctively Western one. Though there are signs from earlier, it can be fairly clearly dated to the middle of the 14th century, to which historians including James Laver and Fernand Braudel date the start of fashion in clothing.[2] [3] The most dramatic manifestation was a sudden drastic shortening and tightening of the male over-garment, from calf-length to barely covering the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing on the chest. This created the distinctive Western male outline of a tailored top worn over leggings or trousers which is still with us today.

The pace of change accelerated considerably in the following century, and women’s fashion, especially in the dressing and adorning of the hair, became equally complex and changing. Art historians are therefore able to use fashion in dating images with increasing confidence and precision, often within five years in the case of 15th-century images. Initially changes in fashion led to a fragmentation of what had previously been very similar styles of dressing across the upper classes of Europe, and the development of distinctive national styles, which remained very different until a counter-movement in the 17th to 18th centuries imposed similar styles once again, finally those from Ancien regime France.[4] Though fashion was always led by the rich, the increasing affluence of Early Modern Europe led to the bourgeoisie and even peasants following trends at a distance sometimes uncomfortably close for the elites - a factor Braudel regards as one of the main motors of changing fashion. [5]

The fashions of the West are unparalleled either in antiquity or in the other great civilizations of the world. Early Western travellers, whether to Persia, Turkey, Japan or China frequently remark on the absence of changes in fashion there, and observers from these other cultures comment on the unseemly pace of Western fashion, which many felt suggested an instability and lack of order in Western culture. The Japanese Shogun’s secretary boasted (not completely accurately) to a Spanish visitor in 1609 that Japanese clothing had not changed in over a thousand years. [6]

Ten 16th century portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show ten entirely different hats, and at this period national differences were at their most pronounced, as Albrecht D�rer recorded in his actual or composite contrast of Nuremberg and Venetian fashions at the close of the 15th century (illustration, right). The “Spanish style” of the end of the century began the move back to synchronicity among upper-class Europeans, and after a struggle in the mid 17th century, French styles decisively took over leadership, a process completed in the 18th century.[7]

Fashion design is the applied art dedicated to the design of clothing and lifestyle accessories created within the cultural and social influences of a specific time.

Fashion design differs from costume design due to its core product having a built in obsolescence usually of one to two seasons. A season is defined as either autumn/winter or spring/summer. Fashion design is generally considered to have started in the 19th century with Charles Frederick Worth who was the first person to sew their label into the garments that they created. While all articles of clothing from any time period are studied by academics as costume design, only clothing created after 1858 could be considered as fashion design.

Fashion designers design clothing and accessories. Some high-fashion designers are self-employed and design for individual clients. Other high-fashion designers cater to specialty stores or high-fashion department stores. These designers create original garments, as well as those that follow established fashion trends. Most fashion designers, however, work for apparel manufacturers, creating designs of men�s, women�s, and children�s fashions for the mass market. Designer brands which have a ‘name’ as their brand such as Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren are likely to be designed by a team of individual designers under the direction of a designer director.

Professional costume designers generally fall into three types: freelance, residential, and academic.

• A freelance designer is hired for a specific production by a theatre, dance or opera company, and may or may not actually be local to the theater that he or she is designing for. A freelancer is traditionally paid in three installments: Upon hire, on the delivery of final renderings, and opening night of the production. Freelancers are not obligated to any exclusivity in what projects they are working on, and may be designing for several theatres concurrently.

• A residential designer is hired by a specific theatre, dance or opera company for an extended series of productions. This can be as short as a summer stock contract, or may be for many years. A residential designer’s contract may limit the amounts of freelance work they are allowed to accept. Unlike the freelancer, a residential designer is consistently “on location” at the theater, and is readily at hand to work with the costume studio and his or her other collaborators. Residential designers tend to be more established than strict freelancers, but this is not always the case.

• An academic designer is one who holds professorship at a school. The designer is primarily an instructor, but may also act as a residential designer to varying degrees. They are often free to freelance, as their schedule allows. In the past, professors of costume design were mostly experienced professionals that may or may not have had formal post-graduate education, but it has now become increasingly common to require a professor to have at least a Master of Fine Arts in order to teach.

Costume design is the design of the appearance of the characters in a theater or cinema performance. This usually involves designing or choosing clothing, footwear, hats and head dresses for the actors to wear, but it may also include designing masks, makeup or other unusual forms, such as the full body animal suits worn in the musical Cats (designed by John Napier, winner of the 1983 Tony Award for Best Costume Design).

The wearing of costumes has become an important part of such holidays and festivals as Mardi Gras and Halloween (see Halloween costume for more information), and (to a lesser extent) people may also wear costumes in conjunction with other holidays, such as Christmas and Easter. Mardi Gras costumes usually take the form of jesters and other fantasy characters, while Halloween costumes traditionally take the form of supernatural creatures such as ghosts, vampires, pop culture icons and angels. Christmas and Easter costumes typically portray mythical characters such as Santa Claus (by donning a santa suit and beard) or the Easter Bunny by putting on an animal costume. Costumes may serve to portray various other characters during secular holidays, such as an Uncle Sam costume worn on the Independence day for example.

The term costume can refer to wardrobe and dress in general, or to the distinctive style of dress of a particular people, class, or period. Costume may also refer to the artistic arrangement of accessories in a picture, statue, poem, or play, appropriate to the time, place, or other circumstances represented or described, or to a particular style of clothing worn to portray the wearer as a character or type of character other than their regular persona at a social event such as a masquerade, a fancy dress party or in an artistic theatricalperformance. Costume business booms up during the halloween as people shop for halloween costumes.