A new addition to the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television could revolutionize the academics of costume design as it is known today.
David C. Copley recognizes the importance of costume design and has recently bestowed a $6 million gift to the School of Theater, Film and Television for a chair position and a center for costume design. Copley, a philanthropist and publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune, has chosen UCLA to be a leading institution in the innovative development of theory and practice of costume design.
The David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design will be the first center of its kind in the world. The center is envisioned to become an institution where the craft of costume design will be enhanced and brought to the forefront of the visual arts.
Leighton Bowers, a recent graduate student in the costume design program, believes that this craft is underrated.
“(Costumes) are the kind of thing for a person that is very unconscious. But if you think about when you watch a movie and how many people are actually on-screen, (costumes) are a really important part. It’s not just background.”
Whether in a movie such as “Pirates of the Caribbean” or a show such as “Two and a Half Men,” costumes contribute to the feel and the mood of the piece and the persona of each character.
“The times people notice costumes is when huge feathers and sequins are involved,” Bowers said. “But costumes are just as important in a story about high school students. But when people look like regular people, it is just not enough for people to appreciate.”
Joe I. Tompkins, an Oscar-nominated costume designer and UCLA professor, believes costumes are essential in visual storytelling.
“Costumes are the foreground. They are right there with the actors saying as much or should be saying as much about the character as the actor.”
Second-year costume design graduate student Russell Dauterman said that costumes enable an instant interpretation of the visual media, whether it’s theater, television or film.
“If you are watching some kind of media where the people involved are trying to convey a story, every little bit helps. And so the first immediate way is to look at the costume, and you get an immediate impression of who that person is by what they are wearing alone.”
The discussion of costume design does not necessarily include the construction of outfits. Designing is about making choices to form a unified and clear message.
“There is this idea that directors think, “˜Costumes, my girlfriend can do that, or the actors can just bring them,'” Bowers said. “Yeah, they can bring something, but it’s not going to be a cohesive piece ““ it’s not going to have the nuances or the subtleties that are needed.”
The goal of costume designers is to bring all the elements of a play or film together to tell a clear and concise story where personalities correctly correlate with the clothes on their back and where the audience can make the right assumptions to understand what it is seeing.
Designers have to analyze each element of the story to fully represent the vision of the director. This includes analyzing the characters and adopting those characteristics into the costume.
“It’s the styles you select, the colors you use,” Tompkins said. “It’s more than anything an attitude that you have to adapt when you are developing your design ideas. For every film you are doing, you have to adapt to a certain perspective and put yourself in a certain place to see that particular story in context with the ideas that are trying to be expressed.”